“What did I say that was nasty?” cried Felicity. “I didn’t say a single thing.”
“Well, it sounded nasty,” said Peter, who knew that it is the tone that makes the music.
“What did your Aunt Jane look like?” asked Cecily sympathetically. “Was she pretty?”
“No,” conceded Peter reluctantly, “she wasn’t pretty—but she looked like the woman in that picture the Story Girl’s father sent her last week—the one with the shiny ring round her head and the baby in her lap. I’ve seen Aunt Jane look at me just like that woman looks at her baby. Ma never looks so. Poor ma is too busy washing. I wish I could dream of my Aunt Jane. I never do.”
“‘Dream of the dead, you’ll hear of the living,’” quoted Felix oracularly.
“I dreamed last night that I threw a lighted match into that keg of gunpowder in Mr. Cook’s store at Markdale,” said Peter. “It blew up—and everything blew up—and they fished me out of the mess—but I woke up before I’d time to find out if I was killed or not.”
“One is so apt to wake up just as things get interesting,” remarked the Story Girl discontentedly.
“I dreamed last night that I had really truly curly hair,” said Cecily mournfully. “And oh, I was so happy! It was dreadful to wake up and find it as straight as ever.”
Felix, that sober, solid fellow, dreamed constantly of flying through the air. His descriptions of his aerial flights over the tree-tops of dreamland always filled us with envy. None of the rest of us could ever compass such a dream, not even the Story Girl, who might have been expected to dream of flying if anybody did. Felix had a knack of dreaming anyhow, and his dream book, while suffering somewhat in comparison of literary style, was about the best of the lot when it came to subject matter. Cecily’s might be more dramatic, but Felix’s was more amusing. The dream which we all counted his masterpiece was the one in which a menagerie had camped in the orchard and the rhinoceros chased Aunt Janet around and around the Pulpit Stone, but turned into an inoffensive pig when it was on the point of catching her.
Felix had a sick spell soon after we began our dream books, and Aunt Janet essayed to cure him by administering a dose of liver pills which Elder Frewen had assured her were a cure-all for every disease the flesh is heir to. But Felix flatly refused to take liver pills; Mexican Tea he would drink, but liver pills he would not take, in spite of his own suffering and Aunt Janet’s commands and entreaties. I could not understand his antipathy to the insignificant little white pellets, which were so easy to swallow; but he explained the matter to us in the orchard when he had recovered his usual health and spirits.