Jimmy’s blue eyes grew wide with wonder. “What’s that?” he demanded.
Barbara was setting six small candles around the edge; last of all she planted one in the middle.
“You couldn’t guess if you tried,” she said gaily. “I just know you couldn’t. You’re such a dull boy.”
“I can guess, too!” cried Jimmy with a shout of rapture. “It’s a cake! It’s my birfday cake! An’ it’s got six candles on it an’ one to grow on. I ’member last year it had only five an’ one to grow on; but I growed that one all up. I want Peg to see it. Can I go out t’ the barn an’ get him? Can I, Barb’ra?”
The girl hesitated as she cast a troubled eye on the table set daintily with the pink china, and the few carefully cherished bits of old silver.
“You may ask Peg to come in and have supper with you, if you like,” she said slowly. “Just this once—because it’s your birthday.”
Jimmy didn’t wait for a second bidding; he dashed out of the back door with a boyish whoop, carefully studied from the big boys in school.
Peg (shortened from Peleg) Morrison had worked on the Preston farm for so many years that he appeared almost as much a part of the place as the shabby old house itself, or the rambling structures at its rear known indeterminately as “the barns.” He slept over the carriage-house, in quarters originally intended for the coachman. Here also he cooked handily for himself on a rusty old stove, compounding what he called “tried an’ tested receipts” out of a queer old yellow-leaved book bound in marbled boards, its pages written over in Peg’s own scrawling chirography.
“I wouldn’t part with that thar book for its weight in gold an’ di’mon’s,” he was in the habit of saying solemnly to Jimmy. “No, Cap’n, I reelly wouldn’t. I begun to write down useful inf’mation in it when I wasn’t much bigger’n you be now, an’ I’ve kep’ it up.”