Terry; Or, She ought to have been a Boy

by Rosa M. Gilbert

"I'll darn the stockings, and sew on the strings and buttons, and read your prayer-book to you, and read the newspaper to you after Grandma has done with it. Is there anything else I can do for you, Nursey darling?"

"Nothing in the world, except try to be good an' keep out of mischief, Miss Terry."

"But I do so want to be good always, Nancy. And I never would be in mischief if I knew it was mischief. It looks so right while I'm doing it, and I don't know how it can be that all of a sudden it goes wrong—"

"Not all of a suddent, Miss Terry. It's always wrong from the beginning with you. If you would only stop and ask your elders at first 'Is this wrong?' before you go at it—"

"But I couldn't do that, unless I had an idea that it was going to be wrong, even perhaps. It always seems to me the rightest, sweetest, loveliest thing in the world—"

"Now, Terry, how can you look me in the face and say you thought it was right to take a big, wet, lumbering watch-dog out of his kennel on a wet day and bring him upstairs to your nursery, dripping his wet over everything, and then dress him up—"

"Oh, Nancy!" cried Terry, splitting into laughter and putting her hands before her face. "Oh, now, wasn't it simply deliciously funny? If you had only been there before he jumped! His eyes were so sweet under your frills, and his paws were so enchanting coming out of your sleeves. And if it hadn't been for your spectacles—Now, tell me a story, Nancy, till it is time to go to Gran'ma."

Terry was so true to her word, did so much reading and stitching and searching about for little things that were lost, that Granny and Nancy agreed to think her real conversion had begun through the breaking of the spectacles. For Nancy had allowed Terry to confess to having broken the glasses, though she would not have dear old Madam disturbed by a description of the pranks with the dog. So long as Nursey had to go groping about as if in the dark, putting her nose to the carpet in search of the dressing-comb she had dropped out of her hand, feeling all over the pin-cushion for a pin, and shaking out the newspaper with an expression on her face which told that it was a perfectly blank sheet to her: while this state of things went on, Terry had no time to think of fresh adventures, so eager was she to come to Nursey's relief with her sharp young eyes and her quick little fingers.

However, a more thorough relief was at hand, and it happened in this way.

Walsh, the old steward at Trimleston, was the same age as Nancy, and the same kind of spectacles suited him. He sometimes went a journey to a town about thirty miles away to pay bills for Madam, and to order things that were wanted about the place. Granny suddenly discovered that he might as well take the journey now as wait for the spring. She gave him a long list of matters to be attended to for her, and then she said: