Stir it up and make it nice
Pop goes the weasel!”
hummed Sally, in flaming echo, and stood still.
All the while, that versatile quirk in her nature, corresponding to the flitting firefly in her eyes, which rendered her attention easily diverted when she wasn’t gravely in earnest, changed her all at once from an eager bubble of curiosity, that must burst if it did not penetrate a trifling secret, into an absorbed spectator. She hung upon the fringe of the playground dances, intent upon every rhythmic movement as the leading couple in each juvenile set (it happened to be a little earringed, lustrous-eyed Syrian girl footing it with a small Turk for a partner in that nearest) formed an arch with their uplifted arms for a gay little dancer to pass beneath.
“Oh-h! don’t they catch on well and dance prettily, these playground children?” murmured Sesooā softly to the quivering interest in her own heart. “I’m awfully glad that Jessica proposed our visiting this playground to-day where there are so many little foreigners not born in this country or whose parents haven’t been long here. She”—dreamily soliloquizing, with a glance at that lavender-smocked figure—“said that, last year, she and the other members of the Akiyuhapi Camp Fire in that Pennsylvanian milling town, where she became a Camp Fire Girl, did so much voluntary work upon the public playground, largely among the little immigrants, teaching them American songs, American games, telling them stories, settling their squabbles. Well! I guess I’m not going to bother her with questions about her ‘Morning-Glory’ name just now. Over there where she’s standing”—flashing another glance at the gray auto, with two girls in it and one leaning against its silver door-knob—“I’d have to bray like a jackass to be heard above the music of that absurd piano, perched upon a low cart. Goody!” with a sudden, excited movement of her vivid shoulders. “I shouldn’t like to be that perched-up pianist. Just suppose the playground horse should take it into his head to pop—to dance—to chase the weasel, too?”
Was it any suddenly restless movement on the part of that four-footed servant of the city which drew the strolling piano upon a low cart from playground to playground to thresh out music for the children’s dances—was it that which flashed the thought backward over his flicking tail, over the head of the pounding pianist seated upon a light cane chair before the lashed piano, flashed it into Sally’s brain? That, or the elfin dance of sunbeams upon his stamping hoofs which, together with the popping dance-cries of the children and the louder popping of the musical instrument behind him—deliriously out of tune, too—must surely infect the staidest horse?
Sally did not know which launched the apprehension, the tickling sunbeams or the restless hoofs and head. But she was used to horses. She found herself mechanically straightening up, controlling the giddy dance-spirit in her own soles, moving nearer—nearer—to the low cart as if she could not help it.
A brilliant orange streak in the sunlight she, flecked oriole-like with black, from the velvet ribbon that lent tone to that saucy little Tam, to the black needlework stars upon the heaving girlish breast.
Then all at once this human flame-bird weaving its way in and out between sets of dancing children was halted by a musical crash, brought up short on tiptoe by a screaming commotion through which rang a nightmare of treble chords wildly sustained by the pianist’s right hand blundering among the shrieking keys of the elevated piano, while her left arm waved on high, imploring help, the whole seeming a premature, mad finale to the popping music, to which every voice upon the playground, animate and inanimate, lent a cry—discordantly at that!