"I was afraid Jason and Almira lived a sort of shiftless, hopeless, get-along-the-best-way-you-can life. When I left Poketown twenty-five years ago I thought it had creeping paralysis! It must be worse by this time.
"But you keep alive, Janice, my dear. Keep kicking—like the frog in the milk-can. Do something. Don't let the poison of laziness develop in your blood. If they're in a slack way there at Jason's, help 'em out of it. Be your Daddy's own girl. Don't shirk a plain duty. Do something yourself, and make others do something, too!"
There was much in Mr. Broxton Day's letter beside this; there were intimate little things that Janice would have shown to nobody; but downstairs she read aloud all Daddy's jolly little comments upon the country and the people he saw; and about his eating beans so frequently that he dreamed he had turned into a gigantic Boston bean-pot that was always full of steaming baked beans. "They are called 'frijoles'," he wrote; "but a bean by any other name is just the same!"
The paragraphs that impressed Janice most, however, as repeated above, she likewise kept to herself. Daddy had expected she would find Poketown just what it was. Yet he expected something of her—something that should make a change in her relatives, and in Poketown itself.
He expected Janice to do something.
CHAPTER X
BEGINNING WITH A BEDSTEAD
Janice got up and took her usual before-breakfast run the next morning. The Days remained the last family to rise in the neighborhood. The smoke from the broken kitchen chimney crawled heavenward long after the fires in other kitchen-stoves had burned down to hot coals.