The very next day Emmy Lou came hurrying home from Sunday school. She had the Dawkins, Sarah, the conscientious elder sister, Maud, and Albert Eddie, for company as far as the grocery at the corner. Since Aunt Cordelia had learned they were English, apparent explanation for those who understood, they had been persuaded to go to St. Simeon's Sunday school too.
Sunday school was to have a—Emmy Lou in her Sunday dress and her Sunday hat, hurrying on from the corner by herself, tried to straighten this out before reaching home and reporting it. What was it Sunday school was to have? In Uncle Charlie's study—a small back room, somewhat battered and dingy but, as he claimed in its defense, his own—was a picture of a stout little man propelled in a wheelbarrow by some other men.
Emmy Lou had discovered that Uncle Charlie loved the little man and prized the picture. When she asked who he was and where he was going in the wheelbarrow, Uncle Charlie said it was Mr. Pickwick going to a picnic. Or, and here was the trouble, was it Mr. Picnic going to a pickwick? It depended on this what Sunday school was to have.
Uncle Charlie, hat and cane in hand, waiting in the hall for Aunt Cordelia to start to church, straightened out the matter. Mr. Pickwick was going to a picnic. It then followed that Emmy Lou, in general a brief person, had such a store of information about the picnic she was moved to share it with Uncle Charlie. This common interest about the circus and their recurring conversations about it were drawing them together, anyhow. Her data about the picnic on the whole was menacing in its character. As, for example:
It was to be in Mr. Denby's grove. He charged too much for it, but St. Simeon's could not do any better. If you went too far away from the swings and the benches the mamma of some little pigs would chase you.
Further. You cannot go to St. Simeon's picnic, or, indeed, to any picnic without a basket! Emmy Lou had endeavored to find out what sort of a basket and Sarah had cut her short with the brief reply, "A picnic basket."
And, finally, "Albert Eddie wishes he'd never started to St. Simeon's. Sarah says he has to go to the picnic and he wants to go to the circus!"
Aunt Cordelia arriving in full church array caught this last. "I've been meaning to speak about it myself. I find the circus is here for the one day only and that the day for St. Simeon's picnic."
Emmy Lou received this as applying to the Dawkins only. The information her inquiries had enabled her to get together led her personally to disparage picnics.
"Albert Eddie says Sarah made him wash dishes at the last picnic he went to. And she makes him carry baskets. That if he'd wash dishes for 'em at the circus and carry water, they'd let him in."