That evening at seven, as Gertrude had suggested, the dwellers of Apple-Blossom Alley gathered in Adele’s room and Matilda Perkins was with them. Her skirt and sleeves were still skimpy and short but the frightened expression had vanished from her beautiful brown eyes which seemed to mirror her every thought.
“Let’s sit in a circle on the floor,” Adele said as she threw fresh wood on the fire. “It’s heaps cosier, and Bettykins, turn the light low, for the blaze is bright enough.”
“Matilda, you sit in the middle,” Doris Drexel suggested, “because you are to be the story-teller to-night. That is if you will be,” she added, smiling at the new pupil. “You see, we are very eager to hear about your Dakota home.”
For a moment a soft, dreamy expression appeared in the eyes that held such a fascination for Adele. “I love my prairie home,” Matilda said almost wistfully, “but I did want to leave it, for it was my mother’s wish that I should come East and have a good education.”
“What is a prairie like?” Peggy asked as Matilda paused.
“Oh, it’s wonderful,” the strange girl replied, turning toward the speaker eyes that fairly glowed. “There’s a wide stretch as far as you can see of waving wheat and corn, golden in the sunlight, with here and there clumps of bright-colored flowers. Blackbirds, with shining, purple-black coats, spring up in a flock when you walk in the corn, and, too, there are meadow-larks and orioles, but that is only in the summer. In the winter there are blizzards that drive fiercely across the plain and the snow piles so high that often I do not leave the house for weeks, except now and then to go to the sod buildings where the chickens and cattle are kept. As soon as they can, the boys dig tunnel-like paths to each outhouse and then they shovel the snow away from the windows so that I can have daylight for my work. It was during those snowed-in weeks that I did most of my studying. I had a queer library of my own, perhaps you will think. It contained very few books, and they were the Bible, ‘Ivanhoe,’ ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ ‘Cranford,’ ‘Little Women,’ ‘Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,’ ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,’ and the almanac, besides the text-books that were used in the country school. I read them over and over on my long shut-in days and evenings, and then sometimes when the boys were away, I would curl up by the fire and listen to the wind that shook the house and wonder if there would ever be anything different. Then, last winter we had a very exciting adventure in a blizzard, and it brought me great good fortune.”
“Oh, do tell us about it, please!” Adele implored.
Matilda Perkins had often told stories aloud when she was a little girl on the prairie. Sometimes her audience had been only her dog, Shep, or again a row of cornstalks that she pretended were children, but to-night, for the first time in her fifteen years, she was called upon to tell a story to real girls of about her own age. The eager interest plainly seen in the nine pairs of eyes turned toward her swept away the last vestige of her shyness and she told the story as simply and as dramatically as she would have done had she been telling it to Shep or to the cornstalks.
“Winter was half spent,” she said, “and we were beginning to think that perhaps there would not be a long, severe blizzard that year, when one afternoon Brother Basil came in from the sod-house where we kept the smoked meat with a heavy ham over his shoulders.
“‘Thought I’d better lay in a good supply,’ he explained. ‘Looks pretty threatening over toward the west. Shouldn’t wonder if we had a blizzard before night.’