It was a long day and a very long week. Pollio had friends enough. Oh, no lack of those! Nunky, papa, and Dick carried him pickapack; mamma and aunt Ann read to him; Teddy was as kind as he could be; and, as for Posy, there was nothing in the world she wouldn’t have done for her Pollio. Then the little boys in town—why, they rushed in in an army! or you would have thought so if you had heard Eliza scold about the mud they brought on their shoes. Even Jimmy Cushing came with a basket of fruit, and begged forgiveness for hitting Pollio’s nose ever so long ago.
Hop-clover came, for Pollio wanted to see her. “Poh! I s’pose you think you’re lame; but look here,” said he, dropping on all-fours. “Can you beat that?”
Hop-clover humbly confessed that she couldn’t. Her lameness wasn’t much: a horse never stepped on her; she only fell down stairs when she was a baby, and she ’spected she lost out one o’ the bones. But now she could read in the Second Reader, and she didn’t care.
Mrs. Pitcher was so charmed with Hop-clover’s sweet little face and patient ways, that she gave her some of Edith’s dresses, and asked her to come twice a week and stay to tea. This made the little girl perfectly happy.
“Oh, how good your mamma is!” said she to Posy. “It’s wicked to wish you was cats and dogs, and I don’t; but I ’most wish I was your Muff or your Beppo, so I could live in this house. I like a house that has a sign to it,” added she, looking wistfully at the framed motto over the nursery-door: “God bless our home.”
Sometimes Pollio was as patient as Hop-clover, and said he was “glad he had something the rest of the family couldn’t catch.” Sometimes, too, he thought he shouldn’t live long. “When I die, I’ll ask God to let me come down and see you once, Posy.”
“Perhaps I’ll die first,” returned she.
“Well, then, I guess there’ll be a row if I can’t go up and see you,” said Pollio.
He really meant no harm; but he did say very improper things sometimes, and it troubled Posy.