"GOODNESS gracious! mercy me!"
"I didn't mean to, Susy; 'pon my word and honor I didn't; just as sure as I'm alive."
Such were the words uttered by two different little voices which our Daisy heard, as holding by General Forster's hand, she reached the gate of Miss Collins' garden on the first morning of her going to school in Glenwood.
Now would it not have been thought that some terrible misfortune must have called forth that exclamation from the first young speaker; or that the second thought herself accused of some dreadful crime, and that she must prove her innocence at once by all the strong words she could think of, if she would escape severe punishment?
And what was this mighty matter?
Why, just this.
Susy Edwards and several of her schoolmates were "making a land of Egypt." For of late the geography lesson of the young class had been upon that country, and they had been much interested in the pictures of the pyramids and Sphinx. And Susy, who "liked to make her knowledge of use in her plays," and who was considered by the other children to have a great genius in that way, had proposed that they should turn a portion of their play-ground into Egypt. This was thought a capital plan, and the recess of the day before had been employed in this way,—the little planners and builders leaving it with great regret, and returning to it before school-time that morning with fresh pleasure and some new ideas.
The gravel walk was supposed to be the desert; the trough which led the waste water from the spring, the River Nile; while a jointed wooden doll, cruelly deprived for the purpose of all its limbs, had half of its remainder buried in the gravel, to represent the Sphinx. Any number of pyramids, four or five inches high, had been built out of pebbles, and several were still going up.
And Lily Ward, the pet and darling of the school, the youngest child, and till that day the newest scholar there, had brought that morning a tiny doll's bath-tub, with a doll to match lying in it, saying it was to be "Moses in the bulrushes, for it couldn't be a real land of Egypt without a Moses."