Four little Blossoms through the holidays

by Mabel C. Hawley

Fred was proud of his football. It was a present from his grandfather, he explained. In five minutes the boys were lined up ready for a game. Of course they knew a real football team needs eleven players, but as Bertrand sensibly said there wasn’t room for eleven in the yard anyway and they could get alone with five.

But from the start the game didn’t go smoothly. Bobby kicked the ball over the fence and then, when he had climbed after it and brought it back, Fred kicked it over the fence on the other side.

“There isn’t room enough here,” complained Elmer. “Can’t we play somewhere else, Bertrand?”

“Back of the carpenter shop, across the street,” suggested Bertrand. “The shop’s built on the edge of the street and there’s an open place in back. Come on, I’ll show you.”

The snowstorm which had begun so briskly the afternoon before when the four little Blossoms were out automobiling had not amounted to much after all. It had melted during the night and though there was a sharp wind and it was cold, the ground was almost bare.

The carpenter shop “on the edge of the street,” was a one-story building on the street end of a long, narrow lot that stretched through to the next block. There was no one around when the boys went around back of the shop and it seemed to be locked up securely. Bertrand said he thought the man who owned the shop had gone away to spend Thanksgiving with his son in another town.

“Will he mind if we play here?” asked Elmer.

“He won’t care a bit,” replied Bertrand confidently. “We won’t hurt anything, and besides he won’t know about it.”

Which wasn’t a very good argument and would have made Father Blossom laugh if he had heard it. But the boys were too eager to resume their game to pay much attention to anything Bertrand said.

Bobby, as captain, had his “signals” written down on a piece of paper and he first explained them to his players and then called off the numbers as he had seen the high school captain do. And when they had tried all the signals three times, Elmer suggested that they practice punting.