They did not seem to find it so, as they sat around the table on the porch, carefully done up in checked aprons, three of them at work on the raspberries, and two helping Celia with the currants.
Each wore a fresh oak leaf, and nothing would do but Rosalind must run back to get one for Miss Celia; and there must have been magic in it, so suddenly did Celia's courage revive.
"I feel better," she said, stopping to turn the leaves of the cook-book. "Let me see,—'boil several hours till the juice is well out of the fruit,'—Sally always lets it drip over night into the big stone jar. I shall have these currants out of the way by dinner-time. You are really a great help. I wish there was something I could do for you."
"Tell us a story, Miss Celia," Belle suggested promptly.
"I don't know any."
"Something about when you were a little girl," said Katherine.
Celia hesitated. "The only story I know is about a magician and a tiger, Rosalind's calling Morgan 'the magician' reminded me of it."
"I love magicians and tigers," Rosalind remarked. "Do you remember the picture I told you about, Maurice? Do tell it to us, Miss Celia."
Celia wondered afterward how she could have done it, but now she thought of nothing but her desire to please the children, so she began:—
"Once there was a little girl who loved fairy tales and believed with all her heart in fairies, magicians, and ogres. In the town where she had recently come to live she had a playmate, a boy, who laughed at her for thinking there were such creatures in the world, and the two often argued the matter.