“All morning I helped Mother. I did lots of things the girls wouldn’t let me do when they were doing the work. I dried the dishes and fed the chickens and dusted the sitting room and scrubbed the walks.
“Then Mother and I had our lunch out under the apple tree in the side yard—some of everything the girls had put in their lunch basket—fried chicken and sponge cake and green-apple pie. My, but it tasted good! In the afternoon Mother made my doll a new dress, and we went together to hunt the little turkeys and get the cows.
“It was awfully late when the folks got back, but I sat up in bed to see them. Every one of them had brought me something. Spread out on the bed were a flag and a bag of peanuts, a pewter tea set from Father, a sticky popcorn ball, and a sack of peppermint lozenges, but the nicest of all was when Nanny gave me a hug and whispered, ‘I had the grandest time of my life, Sarah, and I reckon it’ll take me a month to tell you about all the things I saw.’
“Now, let me think! What in the world will I tell you about tomorrow night? Oh, I know, but I won’t tell.”
THE BEE TREE
There had been honey for supper, and afterward, before the cozy fire in her room, Grandma was telling Bobby and Alice and Pink about how the bees live in little wooden houses called hives and make the honey from a fluid taken from the heart of the flowers.
“But I knew of some bees once that did not live in a hive but in a hollow tree.” Grandma reached for her work basket and drew out her knitting. “While I put the thumb in Bobby’s mitten I’ll tell you about those bees.”
“When I was a little girl,” she began, “not many people kept bees and we could not buy honey at the store, so honey was considered a great treat. The first beehive I ever saw belonged to Mr. Brierly. The Brierly’s lived on the next farm to us, but between them and us, in a little house on Mr. Brierly’s place, lived a family named Henlen. They were very lazy and hunted and fished and worked just enough to get what money they must have. Mr. Brierly had given them a swarm of bees and helped them make a hive for it, and the Brierlys and the Henlens were the only people in our neighborhood who kept bees.
