Giants leaving foot-prints yet?
Are there angels in the valley?
Tell me—I forget.”
—Jean Ingelow.
Jean had been crying; in fact, she was crying now, but the tears were stopped on their way down her cheeks by the rush of her new thought. She was always having new thoughts; but this was the most splendid new thought she had ever had in her fourteen years of life.
“I’ll do it!” she exclaimed aloud, springing to her feet. “I’ll just do it, and nobody will know but myself. I’ll go away to a new place and stay two weeks.”
In her delight she clapped her hands and whirled about the room. It was such a small room to clap your hands and whirl about in. That was the cause of her tears—that small room; that and the house, the farm, and everything she had to do—and doing the same disagreeable things every day, and never going anywhere.
School closed yesterday; and this morning Sophie Elting, her best friend, had gone away, for an outing she called it, with a little city air she had caught from her cousins. She was going to the sea-shore to be gone two weeks.
“I’ll play go,” cried Jean, “and I’ll stay at home and do all the things here that people do when they go on an outing.”