“Did somebody tell you that story?” asked Freddie, after the ending of one he had liked very much.
“No, my dear, I read it in a book,” was the answer. “And now that I have my new glasses, I can read a lot more stories to tell you.”
“That’s good,” said Flossie. “I hope nothing happens to your glasses, Mrs. Martin.”
“I hope not, myself,” she said. “If I lost them or broke them, I would have hard work to replace them, especially out here at Cloverbank. Then I couldn’t read any more.”
The next day was a rainy one—the first the children had met with since coming to Cloverbank, though, as you remember, they had arrived in a hard shower. At first the twins were rather disappointed when they awakened and heard the drizzling downpour, for they had planned a picnic in the woods. But Mrs. Bobbsey, seeing their unhappy faces, laughed and said:
“This is just the kind of day to play in the attic!”
There was a bookcase in the attic, and in it Nan found some old children’s books that had belonged to Mr. Watson’s mother when she was a little girl.
“And such funny, funny stories about such very proper little girls I never before read,” Nan told her mother afterward.
There were trunks full of old clothes, and Flossie dressed up in these. There were some ropes, too, and the boys fastened these to the rafters and did—or Bert did and Freddie tried to do—all sorts of acrobatic tricks. There was old furniture, and chairs and tables were pulled out and made to do for a house, a steamboat, and a train of cars in turn.
After dinner Mrs. Watson pleaded with Mrs. Bobbsey that the boys be permitted to put on overalls and the girls old dresses and run out in the rain to play. Mrs. Bobbsey thought the children might catch cold, but Mrs. Watson laughed and said that such a warm summer rain would never hurt running children, if they came in and dried themselves as soon as they stopped playing.