The Annals of Ann

by Kate Trimble Sharber

I had entirely forgotten about stuffing oranges in with all our clothes when I helped mother pack our trunks! And we were in such a hurry in the express car that we didn't stop to shake the clothes out as we fished them up from the trays; it wouldn't have been polite to, anyway, in front of that good-looking express messenger, and we didn't have room enough. So we had just lifted things out as we came to them and eased them up in our arms as we started on back on our walk to our sleeper.

But the oranges hadn't forgotten about being there! I reckon they wanted to see what all that disturbance was about for, I cross my heart, just as I got opposite the swellest-looking man in that whole string of sleepers, a man with silk socks and golf sticks, a long sleeve of mother's knit corset-cover dropped down against the seat in front of him and four oranges rolled out! They rolled slowly, one by one, and dropped to the floor with muffled thuds. Then they rolled some more and didn't stop until they reached his feet.

That's how I knew he had on silk socks.

CHAPTER XIV

I'm as lonesome as Marianna in the Moated Grange to-night! Isn't that the lonesomest poem on earth? Everything about it is unsanitary, too, from the rusty flower-pots to the blue fly "buzzing in the pane." No wonder it got on Marianna's nerves, in her condition, too! But she had one thing to be thankful for—she didn't know how many germs that fly had on its feet!

I'm lonesome for Jean—or somebody! Thank goodness it is nearly time for Waterloo to come! Cousin Eunice said in a letter that we had from her to-day she was trying to raise Waterloo right, but he was a trial to her feelings! Now, poor Cousin Eunice has read Herbert Spencer for the sake of Waterloo's future education ever since he has been born, and she has never let him out of her sight with a nurse for fear she would feed him chewed-up chestnuts and teach him about the Devil. I reckon you spell him with a capital letter, if you don't waste them on presiding elders. But Waterloo doesn't always show how carefully he's been brought up. He is of nervous temperament and told a woman who was sewing on the machine right loud the other day: "Hus', hus'! God's sake, make noise easy!"

This is disheartening after all the trouble she has taken with his morals and diet and things like that! She never lets him eat the "deadly" things that Doctor Gordon is always talking about, but she does keep a little pure sugar candy on hand all the time to be used only as a last resort. When she can't make him do any other way on earth she uses the candy.

Speaking of deadly things reminds me of Doctor Bynum's friends, the germs. He has told Miss Irene so many stories about their unpleasant ways that she got to not believing in kissing, but he said pshaw! it looked like we all had to die of germs anyhow, and so he'd rather die of that kind than any other!

Cousin Eunice's letters always tell us so many interesting things about all our friends in the city. She and Ann Lisbeth still live close neighbors, but they have both bought beautiful places out on one of the pikes and each one is claiming to be more countrified than the other. One day Ann Lisbeth ran over and told Cousin Eunice that Doctor Gordon had heard an owl in their yard the night before, but Cousin Eunice told her that wasn't anything! She and Rufe had had a bat in their bedroom!