"I won't—unless I please. I'll never be married to keep people from laughing, Cassy Hallock."
Here Grace set her little foot firmly upon a toad, which she mistook for solid ground.
"Cassy," continued she, after a little scream, "let's work for those darling old soldiers in the hospital. What have we been thinking about? Don't you let on! After a little, you know, when school stops, Cassy! O, can we wait that long?"
Meanwhile, we must attend to a new arrival. Uncle Edward Parlin dropped in suddenly, as good and smiling as ever, and with him little Prudy, blushing like a rose, but so dusty that she almost made you sneeze. But where was Susy? It seemed that Mrs. Parlin had not had time to prepare both the children for such a hasty journey.
Horace shouted like a young Indian. Grace clapped her hands, and laughed in every note of the scale up to the second octave and back again.
Prudy threw her arms about Mrs. Clifford's neck.
"O, aunt Ria," she whispered, "bimeby I shall cry."
"Aren't you well, darling?"
"Yes'm; but I feel as if I wasn't going to feel well."
It had been a hard journey for the poor little thing. She was soon nicely bathed and put in a comfortable bed, where, for about at minute, she lay wondering at the mosquito-bar, and then forgot all her trials in sleep. Next morning, Horace asked what she had dreamed.