"Everyone does," retorted Shirley. "Only they say 'Old Fiddlestrings' and we don't—do we, Sarah?"
"He has a stuffed snake," said Sarah who seldom troubled herself to answer questions that failed to directly interest her. "Rich, you said you'd show me how to stuff a snake and you never did."
"Well, I never got around to it," Richard apologized. "I'm one who found the summer too short."
Mr. Hildreth grunted.
"Guess you don't need a stuffed snake, Sarah," he said humorously. "A stuffed chicken seemed to be too much for your family."
Sarah looked disgusted, while the others laughed at the recollection of that chicken. Sarah, a few weeks before, had found a dead chicken under the carriage house and had decided it to be a Heaven-sent opportunity to practise her theories of taxidermy. She had stuffed the carcass with a variety of available materials—grass and hay and pebbles, mixed with small sticks and cakes of mud—and, her task completed, had hidden the treasure in a cupboard in the pantry. For some reason she deemed the sympathy of her family doubtful and she made no mention of the experiment to anyone.
It was not long before Winnie complained of an unpleasant odor in her always thoroughly aired pantry. She stood it for one day, grumbling. The second day she began to talk about "country plumbing" and the third morning she started in to scrub and scour and disinfect vigorously. Her activities led her to the dark corner where Sarah had stowed her chicken and the subsequent interview was brief and to the point. Sarah buried the unfortunate fowl, using the cake turner which she was later to bury also on command of Winnie, and this, to date, had been her sole experience with "stuffing" anything.
Rosemary leaned forward, smiling at the fire.
"What are you thinking of, Rosemary?" asked her brother, dexterously shifting Sarah's position so that she could not kick the fire with her shoes—a feat she was anxious to accomplish.
"Oh, ever so many things," said Rosemary. "About Louisa and Alec and the circus. And the poor farm, too."