“Let’s go and look at the cherries,” said the lollypop man. “Hurray!”
Oh, what a lot of cherries there were! No wonder Grandpa Martin’s place was called Cherry Farm! The trees in the grove bent down their branches which were laden with red cherries and black. Some were purple, and when the Curlytops ate them their faces and hands were all stained.
“’Ist like we tipped over de ink bottle!” laughed Trouble, who was given one or two cherries, not enough to make him ill, but enough to color him.
Then there were some big white cherries, with red cheeks, and Grandpa Martin called them “ox-hearts.” And when the Curlytops asked him why, not seeing anything about them like an ox, they were told the cherries had that name because of their large size.
“You have the finest crop of cherries of anyone around here!” said the lollypop man when he had gone through the grove. “My friend, the candy man, will buy all you want to sell, and pay you well. Then you will have plenty of money.”
“I’ll sell all my wife doesn’t want to can, and all these little Curlytops don’t want to eat,” laughed Grandpa Martin.
“Oh, how glad I am!” cried Jan. “Now grandpa can give some money to Hal’s Crippled Home!”
And so Grandpa Martin could. His cherries sold for much more money than ever before, being sent to the factory where the Chewing Cherry Candy was made. And, a little later, the lollypop man drove past the house with his red wagon and white horse and called:
“Oh, ho! Oh, ho! I love a goat. Come see my white coat, and get some cherry candy! Oh, ho! Oh, ho! Come get cherry candy!”
This the Curlytops did, and they said the new cherry chewing candy was the best they had ever eaten. Perhaps it was because it had in it some of Grandpa Martin’s cherries.