“But the old lady was real nice to me,” confessed Celia. “And she gave me real nice things to eat. And—Oh, yes! she laughed at me so. You see, I was a nawful greeny!”
“I expect you were, dear,” chuckled Dorothy. “You had never seen the country before?”
“No, I never had. And I saw the chickens go to roost, and the old lady caught one chicken and began to pick his feathers off, and that’s when she laughed so at me.”
“Why?” asked Dorothy.
“You see, I didn’t know about it, and I asked her: ‘Do you take off their clo’es every night, lady?’ And of course they don’t,” finished Celia, laughing shrilly herself now. “Chickens ain’t like folks.”
“No; not very much like folks,” agreed Dorothy, greatly amused.
“No. We eat—ed that chicken the next day,” said Celia. “An’ it was nawful good. We don’t have chicken—much—at the Findling.”
“Perhaps it will be nice at Mrs. Hogan’s for you, Celia, dear,” suggested the older girl. “Perhaps it will be as nice as it was at that other farm.”
But the little one shook her head slowly and for the first time the tears welled into her eyes and over-ran them, falling drop by drop down her thin cheeks. She did not sob, or cry, as a child usually does.
“No,” she whispered. “Mrs. Ann Hogan isn’t like the good lady I was with for two weeks las’ summer. No, Mrs. Hogan isn’t like that.”