“Don’t put any such nonsense into her head, Dick. She is a born duck now and is forever teasing to go wading,” Mrs. Morton had replied.
“Why we’ll have to call you Ducky Daddles instead of Chicken Little,” said Dick.
Mrs. Morton repeated the incident to Mrs. Halford the following day.
“Children certainly do have the craziest notions. Chicken Little has been fretting all spring to go out in the rain. I suspect several slight colds she has had are due to experiments of that kind.” Mrs. Morton looked both amused and annoyed.
“Yes, Katy and Gertie have had the same craze—I guess it’s natural. I remember the spring rains used to have the same attraction for me when I was a child. My father used to say children should be born web-footed—they love water so. Puddles do look tempting. I think the thing that cured me was one of those dashing spring showers that bring the earthworms out. Some kind child made me believe they rained down. I loathed the slimy things. You couldn’t get me out doors, if it so much as looked like rain, for weeks after. I kept imagining the crawly things dropping down on my hair and face. Ugh! I remember just how I felt even yet.”
“That might be a good way to cure our would-be ducklings.”
“No, I don’t think so—fear is never the best way to cure a child, and I like my girls to love rain as well as shine. But I’ve been wondering if it might not be a good idea to let them go out once in a good hard thunder shower just to get it out of their systems—though, of course, there would be fear in that, too.”
Some two weeks after this conversation between the mothers, Chicken Little was spending Saturday morning at the Halfords’. The children were playing keep house out under the gooseberry bushes. The bushes were very old and tall. Mr. Halford kept them trimmed up underneath, forming leafy aisles about three feet high. Here the little girls delighted to set up their doll goods in the late spring and early summer.
They had everything arranged to their taste on this particular morning. They had settled down in charge of a most extensive dolls’ hospital, using the aisles between the rows of bushes for wards and the green gooseberries for pills—a most convenient arrangement because the supply of medicine never gave out. But, alas, before Dr. Katy had time to inspect a single ward, big drops began to patter down, and Gertie’s cherished Minnie, suffering from a terrible attack of pneumonia, was well sprinkled before her anxious mother could remove her to a sheltered spot. The sprinkle was but the beginning of a smart shower that sent the children scurrying to the house with their arms filled with a jumble of patients and bedding. Gertie regarded them dumped in a heap on the kitchen floor, ruefully.
“Minnie’ll take an awful cold and die I just know, and my new pink silk quilt got wet and the pink’s run into the white!”