“What is the matter?” cried Nyoda and Gladys and Betty and Sahwah, running to the rescue.
“It’s a cat!” said Migwan, faintly. “I thought it was a monkey!”
“Moral: Don’t read Poe before going to bed,” said Nyoda, while the rest shouted with laughter at the cause of Migwan’s fright.
“It must have jumped in from the tree,” said Hinpoha. “I see our screen has fallen out.”
There was little sleep in the house the rest of the night. During the time when the screen was out of the window the room had filled with mosquitoes, which soon found their way to the rest of the rooms. “If you offered me the choice of sleeping in a room with a monkey or a swarm of mosquitoes, I believe I’d take the monkey,” said Nyoda, slapping viciously. Altogether it was a heavy-eyed group that came down to breakfast the next morning.
“What are we going to do to-day?” asked Gladys.
“The usual thing,” said Migwan, “pull weeds. That is, I am. You girls don’t need to help all the time. I don’t want you to think of my garden as merely a lot of weeds to be forever pulled. I want you to remember only the beautiful part of it.”
“We don’t mind pulling weeds,” cried the girls, stoutly, “it’s fun when we all do it together,” and they fell to work with a will.
“I declare,” said Migwan, “I have become so zealous in the pursuit of weeds that I mechanically start to pull them along the roadside. I actually believe that if a weed grew on my grave I’d rise up and eradicate it. I little thought when I proudly won an honor last summer for identifying ten different weeds that they’d get to haunting my dreams the way they do now. Now I know what people mean when they say ‘meaner than pusley.’ It’s the meanest thing I’ve ever dealt with. I cut off and pull up every trace of it one day and the next day there it is again, just as flourishing as ever.”
“I don’t call that meanness,” said Nyoda, “that’s just cheerful persistence. Think what a success we’d all be in life if we got ahead in the face of obstacles in that way. If I didn’t already have a perfectly good symbol I’d take pusley for mine. If it were edible I think I’d use it as an exclusive article of diet for a time and see if I couldn’t absorb some of its characteristics.”