Ethel Morton at Rose House

by Mabell S. C. Smith

Little Vladimir was up early with a memory of something queer having happened in the night. He was eager to go downstairs and find out what it was all about and his mother dressed him and let him out of her room and then turned over to take another nap. When Moya went down to set the oil stove in position for use he was amusing himself contentedly with the rubbish in the fireplace, his face and hands already in need of renewed attention from his mother.

"'Tis the sooty-faced young one ye are," she called to him good-naturedly. "Run up to the brook and wash yerself an' save yer mother the throuble."

She opened the back door and he ran out into the yard, but instead of going up the lane to the brook he scampered round the house and down the lane. Moya called after him but he paid no attention. "Sure, I've too much to do to be day-nursing that young Russian," she murmured.

There were wonderings and ejaculations in many tongues when all the women and children came down and examined the cracks in the kitchen side of the chimney and in the back of the dining-room fireplace and saw the heap of rubbish and bricks piled up in the fireplace. It gave them something to talk about all the morning. This was lucky, for the grass was too wet for the children to play on it, and when mothers and children were crowded on the veranda idle words sometimes changed to cross ones.

"Tis strange; they's good women, iv'ry wan, take 'em alone," Moya had said one day to Mrs. Schuler and Ethel Blue when they heard from the kitchen the sounds of dispute upon the porch; "yit listen to 'em whin they gits together."

"That's because each one of them gets out of the talk just what she puts into it," explained the Matron.

"Manin' that if she comes to it cross it's cross answers she gits. It's right ye are, ma'am. 'Tis so about likin' or hatin' yer work. Days when yer bring happiness to yer work it goes like a bird, an' days when ye have the black dog on yer back the work turns round an' fights wid yer."

Ethel Blue listened intently. Things like that had happened to her but she had not supposed that grown people had such experiences. She remembered a day during the previous week when she had waked up cross. A dozen matters went wrong before she left the house to go to school. On the way the mud pulled off one of her overshoes, and her boot was soiled before she was shod again. The delay made her five minutes late and caused a black mark to deface her perfect attendance record. Every recitation went wrong in one way or another, and every one she spoke to was as cross as two sticks. As she thought it over she realized that if what Mrs. Schuler and Moya said was true the whole trouble came from herself. When she woke up not in the best of humor she ought to have smoothed herself out before she went down to breakfast, and then she would have picked her way calmly over the crossing and not tried to take a short cut through the mud; she would not have been delayed and earned a tardy mark; she would have had an unclouded mind that could give its best attention to the recitations so that she would have done herself justice; people would have been glad to talk to her because she looked cheerful and was in a sunny mood and no one would have been cross.

"I guess it was all my fault," she thought. "I guess it will pay to straighten myself out before I get out of bed every morning."

All was well in and out of Rose House on the morning after the storm. Every one told her experiences as if she were the only person affected and they all talked at once and enjoyed themselves immensely. Vladimir came running up on to the porch in the middle of the morning and threw himself across his mother's lap.