“But you won’t get us to fire a gun,” said Sally tersely. “till we can see the whites of their eyes.”
CHAPTER IX.
FORS FORTUNA.
The very next day, Louis, by what his father and Dr. Richards would have agreed to call “blind chance,” found a silver quarter lying in the gutter before his own door. Yet it was certainly not blind chance, but sheer hard work, that had worn a hole in Frau Anna’s thimble.
Louis had been wishing very much that he could buy her another, for she had said that it was almost impossible to use the old one. Once the needle had slipped in through the hole, and run up under her nail, which had hurt her very much indeed; and the necessity of keeping it away from the worn place hindered her work. Louis and George had talked the matter over very seriously, with many wishes that they were as big as Franz and Bruno, the pastor’s sons, and could earn money by chopping wood and shovelling snow. And now here was a whole silver quarter, which would surely buy many things beside a thimble.
He started at once in search of George, whom he found sitting on a box outside the grocery, consuming an apple which had been given him by the grocer’s wife. Now, if the apple had been Louis’, a part of it would as surely have found its way to George as the early worm finds out the nest where the mother bird’s brood wait to welcome it; but this view of the case did not occur to any one but the good-natured grocery woman, who showed her appreciation of the situation by bestowing another apple on Louis.
But before the child would bite even once into its red and tempting cheeks, he related to George all the circumstances concerning the finding of the quarter, and the marvellous purchasing power thereto appertaining.
“Where does the thimble-man live?” asked George, when they had planned to buy everything in town,—from a live pony to a penny trumpet.
“I don’t know,” said Louis gravely; but the grocery woman, who had been standing in the doorway listening to the conversation, with her hands on her hips, probably to keep her fat sides steady, they shook so with laughter, interrupted them.
“Do you know where Martin, the jeweller, lives?”
“Yes,” said Louis brightly. “’Tisn’t far; he mended our clock.”