“Then my pa will take her to live with us,” said Robert Day, “and Grandma Padgett will do by her just as she does by aunt Krin and me. She isn't a very lively little girl. I'd hate to play Blind Man with her to be blinded; for seems as if she'd just stand against the wall and go to sleep. But it'll be a good thing to have one still child about the house: aunt Corinne fidgets so. I believe, though, her folks are hunting her. Look what a fuss there was about us I When people's children get lost or stolen, they hunt and hunt, and don't give it up.”
In the carriage, aunt Corinne sitting by her mother, turned her head at every fifth revolution of the wheels, to see how the strange little girl fared.
“Do you s'pose she will ever be clear awake, Ma Padgett?” inquired, aunt Corinne.
“She'll drowse it off by and by,” replied Ma Padgett. “The rubbing I give her this morning, and the stuff the Richmond doctor made her swallow, will bring her out right.”
“She's so pretty,” mused aunt Corinne. “I'd like to have her hair if she never wanted it any more.”
“That's a covetous spirit. But it puts me in mind,” said Grandma Padgett, smiling, “of my sister Adeline and the way she took to get doll's hair.”
Aunt Corinne had often heard of sister Adeline and the doll's hair, but she was glad to hear the brief tale told again in the pleasant drowsing afternoon.
The Indiana landscape was beautiful in tones of green and stretches of foliage. Whoever calls it monotonous has never watched its varying complexions or the visible breath of Indian summer which never departs from it at any season.
“Mother came in from meeting one day,” said Grandma Padgett, “and went into her bedroom and threw her shawl on the bed. She had company to dinner and was in a hurry. It was a fine silk shawl with fringe longer than my hand. Uncle Henry brought it over the mountains as a present. But Adeline come in and saw the fringe and thought what nice doll hair it would make. So by and by mother has an errand in the bedroom, and she sees her shawl travelling down behind the bed, and doesn't know what to think. Then she hears something snip, snip, and lifts up the valance and looks under the bed, and there sets Adeline cutting the fringe off her shawl! She had it half cut off.”
“And what did Grandma do then?” aunt Corinne omitted not to ask.