“Hey?” said Grandma. “What does he say, Davie?”
“He says we haven’t driven out the hens. Oh, I forgot them, Grandma,” said Davie in a sorry little voice. It was impossible to be more mortified than he was at this moment.
“Well, you can do it now,” said Grandma composedly; “it’s gittin’ late, and hens knows better’n most folks when it’s along about time to go to bed. They’ll go easy—like enough.”
David lifted up the calico valance running around the bed, and Peletiah got down on his knees and lifted up the part hanging down his side. There bunched up together were the two fat biddies. They turned sleepy eyes on the two boys. And when Peletiah inserted the broom under the bed, they got up, shook their feathers, and marched off to the kitchen, and so out of doors, much preferring to roost respectably on a tree than under a feather bed.
CHAPTER XVII
THE FISHING PARTY
“I VERY much wish I could go,” said David to himself, and he sighed clear down in his little heart. Then he crept out from behind the wood-pile, his favorite place when he had anything to think out, and started to run as fast as he could down the lane into the high road.
“Because if I don’t hurry, Joel will ask Mamsie to let me go, too, and I promised Mr. Atkins I’d help him keep store to-day.
“And besides,” as he panted on, “I should lose the ten cents he’d give me for Mamsie.”
So he was all hot and tired out when he pushed open the door to the store. Mr. Atkins was behind the counter.
“You needn’t to ’a’ hurried so,” he said; “you’re all het up, Davie. Now set down an’ rest.”