When breakfast was over they went forth upon kindly compulsion from the farmhouse kitchen and, barefooted, were turned loose on a grassy mead. At once all Nature appeared in a conspiracy against them. The wide reaches of space disturbed them, whose horizon always had been fenced in with tall, close-racked buildings. The very earth was a pitfall, bearded with harsh saw-edged grass blades, drenched with chilly dews, and containing beneath the ambush of its green covering many rough and uneven depressions. The dew irritated Solly’s naked legs, making him long for the soothing contact of Pike Street’s mud-coated cobbles. Miriam stubbed her shrinking pink toes against hidden clods when she essayed a timorous step or two forward. So both of them stood still, then, very much at a loss to know what they should or could do next.
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Somebody suggested to Miriam that she pick the wild flowers and the wild vine tendrils and weave them into garlands. Was it her fault that her very first selections should be a spray of poisoned sumac, first cousin to poison ivy, and that her second should be a handful of nettles? Somebody else undertook to induct Solly into the pleasures of tree climbing. Was it altogether his fault that he should promptly fall out of the first crotch and painfully sprain and bruise himself in several places?
And when, finally, they had been induced to quit the immediate proximity of the farmhouse, which at least provided a refuge and a shelter from suspected dangers, and had ventured over a fence and into a pasture, a most terrible thing occurred. Toward them there suddenly advanced an enormous red creature, tossing a huge head crowned with sharp horns, and emitting frightful, rumbling sounds from a great rubbery muzzle.
With shrieks of terror, they fled blindly into a patch of woodland that was perhaps two acres in extent; and, losing themselves in its—to them—vast and impenetrable depths, they remained there, crouching behind a tree until discovered, tearful, hungry and disconsolate, by a volunteer search party shortly before sunset. Miriam’s subsequent description of the monster that had menaced them, as detailed to her mother, gave Mamma Finkelstein a mental picture of something which might be likened [296] to a cross between a raging rhinoceros and a hook-and-ladder motor truck. For it had been many a year since Mamma Finkelstein herself had seen a yearling heifer. And Miriam never had seen one before.
It was indeed a hard and an irksome week. The end of it saw the two small adventurers, both sun-blistered and peeling, both broken out as to hands and legs with strange, irritating rashes, and both with gladness in their little homesick souls, returning to the beloved perils and the customary pleasures of the torrid town.
After this the Finkelsteins for a while had a welcomed respite from kindness. They fairly revelled in it; but not for a great while, nor, in fact, for very long, did it endure. Following Labor Day, Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass came back from her country place up Greenwich way and reopened her city place. It transpired that with her she had brought a perfectly splendid idea. She was going to establish the Finkelsteins on an abandoned farm. While motoring about over the country lanes in Connecticut she had found the very spot for them—an ideal spot, indeed—nine acres, and nine miles from a railroad, with a ruinous little cottage, all furnished, perched upon a rocky hillock in the centre of the nine acres.
It was upon this site she was resolved they should be domiciled. There—as she herself said—Papa Finkelstein might turn farmer and maybe make a fortune. There Mamma Finkelstein [297] could rear her brood in peace and quiet, far aloof and remote from the teeming multitude. There the fresh, pure air of the country would restore the bloom of health to the cheeks of all the little Finkelsteins. What mattered it though the little Finkelsteins were already so healthy that if they had been any healthier than they were it might have been necessary to tap them for it? I am not detailing what was actually the case, but what Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass, in the exuberance engendered by her generous impulses, said about it.
A scheme so large required cooperation. Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass secured it from Miss Godiva Sleybells, whom she had met upon more than one occasion when the two of them chanced to happen in upon the Finkelsteins at the same time, and from Miss Betty Gwin, who frequently had been called upon to detail to a hungry reading public particulars concerning Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass’ social and charitable endeavours.
Together these three constituted a committee on ways, means and publicity. Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass provided the funds for leasing the nine acres and for transporting its ten future tenants to their future home. Miss Godiva Sleybells agreed, for her part, to insure that the prospective colonists, both big and little, were properly loaded and properly shipped to their destination. Miss Betty Gwin wrote a moving word picture two columns [298] long about it, in which she mentioned the late Baron de Hirsch once and Mrs. F. Fodderwood Bass a great many times.
Actually the day preceding the day set for the removal of the Finkelsteins arrived before it occurred to the three conferees that they had entirely forgotten until that minute to take the Finkelsteins into their confidence—not that it very much mattered; this was but an incidental detail, which before now had been altogether overlooked. Miss Sleybells volunteered to go and tell them. She went and she did.