Kristy's Rainy Day Picnic

by Olive Thorne Miller

“Well,” said Stella, “you must of course do as you choose.”

The boating party consisted, besides Stella and Lettie, and Stella’s cousin Maud, of Stella’s brother and two of his friends. These two young men it was to whom Lettie’s mother had objected. They were rather wild fellows, sons of rich men, and not obliged to do anything, given up to sports and rather noisy pranks in the city. They were intimate with Stella’s brother, who was one of their kind also.

The moon rose about nine o’clock that evening, and at that hour the gay party took their way to the little boathouse, where they embarked in a small sailboat which was waiting for them.

The young men understood the management of a boat, and for a time all went well. They talked and laughed and sang, and enjoyed the moonlight and the rapid motion, and Lettie thought she never had such a lovely time in her life.

After awhile the spirit of teasing began to show itself among the boys. They liked to frighten the girls, as thoughtless boys often do, and after such harmless pranks as spattering water over them, to hear their little screams of protest, they fell to the more dangerous, but very common, play of rocking the boat, threatening to upset it.

The girls, resolved not to be frightened, for a long time did not cry out, and this drew the boys on to greater exertions, determined to make them scream and beg. At last the thing happened that so often does happen to reckless boys,—a sudden puff of wind caught the sail, the boat lurched, and in a moment the whole party were struggling in the water.

Thoroughly frightened now, the boys, who could all swim, at first struck out for the shore, which was at some distance. Then, recalled to their senses by the cries of the girls, two of them turned back to their aid. Whether they would have reached the shore with their frightened and unmanageable burdens is uncertain, but, a tugboat happening to come along, they were all picked up and carried to a dock a mile or more below.

There, after waiting a half hour, drenched and chilled all through, while the boys tried in vain to get a carriage,—for by this time it was very late,—the party took a street car, which carried them up town, but not near Stella’s, and they had to wait another half hour at a crossing for another car.

It was two o’clock in the morning before Lettie, with Stella and her brother, reached the house, a wretched, draggled-looking, and very cross party, all without hats,—for these had been lost in the river,—and Lettie, her fine silk dress a ruin, her delicate shoes a shapeless mass from which the water squirted as she walked.

By breakfast time Lettie, who was a delicate girl, was in a high fever, and the doctor, who was hastily called in, decided that she was threatened with pneumonia. Lettie’s mother was notified, and hurried down, and, bundled up in many wraps, Lettie was conveyed in an ambulance to her home and her own bed, where she remained for weeks, battling for her life, delirious much of the time, and living over in fancy the horrors of the day she had had her own way.