Little Fishers: and Their Nets

by Pansy

"Oh! they would gather, little by little. I know some people who would donate great piles of them if we had a place to put them. For that matter, as it is, father is going to send us some picture-papers, a great bundle of them; send them by express, and we must have a table to put them on."

So the plans grew, but constantly they looked at the long, low building and said what a nice place it would be.

One morning Jerry came across the yard with a grave face. "What do you think?" he said, the moment he caught sight of Nettie. "They have gone and rented our rooms for a horrid old saloon; whiskey in front, and gambling in the back part! Isn't it a shame that they have got ahead of us in that kind of way?"

"Oh dear me!" said Nettie, drawing out each word to twice its usual length, and sitting down on a corner of the woodbox with hands clasped over the dish towel, and for the moment a look on her face as though all was lost.

But it was the very same day that Jerry appeared again, his face beaming. This time it was hard to make Nettie hear, for Mrs. Decker was washing, and mingling with the rapid rub-a-dub of the clothes was the sizzle of ham in the spider, and the bubble of a kettle which was bent on boiling over, and making the half-distracted housekeeper all the trouble it could. Yet his news was too good to keep; and he shouted above the din: "I say, Nettie, the man has backed out! Our rooms are not rented, after all."

"Goody!" said Nettie, and she smiled on the kettle in a way to make it think she did not care if everything in it boiled over on the floor; whereupon it calmed down, of course, and behaved itself.

So the weeks passed, and the enterprise grew and flourished. I hope you remember Mrs. Speckle? Very early in the autumn she sent every one of her chicks out into the world to toil for themselves and began business. Each morning a good-sized, yellow-tinted, warm, beautiful egg lay in the nest waiting for Jerry; and when he came, Mrs. Speckle cackled the news to him in the most interested way.

"She couldn't do better if she were a regularly constituted member of the firm with a share in the profits," said Jerry.

The egg was daily carried to Mrs. Farley's, where there was an invalid daughter, who had a fancy for that warm, plump egg which came to her each morning, done up daintily in pink cotton, and laid in a box just large enough for it. But there came a morning which was a proud one to Nettie. Jerry had returned from Mrs. Farley's with news. "The sick daughter is going South; she has an auntie who is to spend the winter in Florida, so they have decided to send her. They start to-morrow morning. Mrs. Farley said they would take our eggs all the same, and she wished Miss Helen could have them; but somebody else would have to eat them for her."

Then Nettie, beaming with pleasure, "Jerry, I wish you would tell Mrs. Farley that we can't spare them any more at present; I would have told you before, but I didn't want to take the egg from Miss Helen; I want to buy them now, every other morning, for mother and father; mother thinks there is nothing nicer than a fresh egg, and I know father will be pleased."