"I know you didn't, Rosie, but I want you to know how you can make me suffer by doing wrong—but there, there! don't cry any more. If you are good and kind and true like your mother was you'll outgrow this trouble. Now run away and help get supper."
The buoyancy of a healthy child's nature enabled her to throw off the oppression of that dark day, the most terrible day of her life, and she was soon cheerful again, not the child she had been, but still a happy child. After a few weeks John sent for Carl to come over, and they popped corn and played dominos all the evening, and the innocency of their former childish companionship seemed restored.
CHAPTER VI
HER FIRST IDEAL
One June day a man came riding swiftly up the lanes, in a buggy with a gilded box. As he passed the school-house he flung a handful of fluttering yellow and red bills into the air.
"A circus! a circus!" was the cry as the boys rushed for the blowing sheets of paper. It was a circus, the annual "monstrous aggregation of Gregorian games and colossal cataracts of gilded chariots," and it was coming to Tyre.
The children read every word of those high sounding posters, standing in knots by the roadside. It was the mightiest event of their lives. Most of them had never been to a circus. Many had never been so far as Tyre. Some had, however, and they straightway became fountains of wisdom, and declaimed upon the splendors of other aggregations.
Rose looked at the lines of knights and ladies winding down the yellow broadside of the sheet, and wondered if she would ever see them.
The courier rode on. He flung a handful of the bills over into the corn-field where Carl was plowing corn with the hired man, and Carl straightway began to plan.