“I ran as fast as ever I could to find Father and Mother and tell them. Mother hugged me and laughed and cried at the same time and said she always knew it, and Father made me tell over to him three times, word for word, every single thing Stanley had said.
“‘He must never know,’ Mother said. ‘He must never suspect for a minute that we thought he didn’t want to go, the poor dear boy, keeping his trouble to himself for fear of worrying us.’ And she told me to get Charlie and catch a couple of chickens to fry for supper. Then I knew she was happy again, for whenever Mother was happy or specially pleased with one of us she always had something extra good to eat.
“Pass the apples, Alice, please, and tomorrow night if you’re real good and don’t get kept in at school I’ll tell you—well, you just be real good and you’ll see what I’ll tell you about.”
EASTER
It was the night before Easter. Grandma had told Bobby and Alice and Pink of the first Easter, and had explained about the egg being the symbol of life because it contains everything necessary for the awakening of new life.
“When I was a little girl,” she said, “we had lots of chickens and of course we had lots of eggs. We got so many eggs that we could not use them all—not even if Mother made custards and omelets and angel cake every day.
“Father or the boys would take the eggs we did not need to the store and trade them for sugar or coffee or pepper or rice. But for quite a while before Easter they did not take any eggs to the store.
“It was a custom for the children to hide all the eggs that were laid for a couple of weeks before Easter. Father and Mother had done it when they were little, and all the boys and girls who went to our school did it, too. We would bring them in Easter morning and count them. Each of us might keep the eggs we found to sell, and Father always gave a fifty-cent piece to the one who had the most eggs. Even the big boys and Aggie and Belle hid eggs, for money was scarce and sometimes the egg money amounted to a good deal. We were allowed to keep all the eggs we found, no matter to whom they belonged and how we hunted.
“We searched in the hen house, the barn, the haymow, in old barrels and boxes, in fence corners, and even in the wood-box behind the kitchen stove. One spring a brown leghorn hen slipped into the kitchen every other day and laid in the wood-box. You never could tell where a hen might lay, so we looked every place we could think of.