“‘She doesn’t live here,’ he said crossly, and lay down again. ‘She lives in the next house. Must have been my little sister let you in. This is our house and I got the measles.’
“Charlie and I got out as quickly as we could and hurried to Aunt Louisa’s, but we decided that we would not tell her or anyone else we had had such a glorious, accidental chance for the measles.
“‘We mightn’t take the measles after all,’ Charlie pointed out, ‘and then Mother would be disappointed.’
“‘I hope we don’t take them on the way home,’ I said anxiously. I didn’t know then that it takes the measles germ nine days to mature and that we were in little danger of taking it before that time.
“The next day, being tired from my trip to town, I imagined I was sick and I was sure I was taking the measles. Charlie examined my face carefully, though, and said he couldn’t see any red spots. In a day or two Charlie thought he was taking the disease, but there were no red spots on his face, either.
“‘And if they’re in you Mother says they’ve got to come out,’ I told him wisely. ‘So as long as it doesn’t show on the outside we haven’t got it.’
“A week passed, and after several more false alarms we came to the conclusion that we were not going to take the measles after all.
“Sunday the Presiding Elder was to be at our church and there were to be two sermons, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, with a basket dinner in between. Mother and the girls were very busy cooking and baking, or maybe some of them would have seen that Charlie and I were not well on Saturday. I ached all over, my head most of all, and Charlie said he felt sick from his head to his toes. We slipped out to the barn and crawled up in the hay loft and lay down on the hay. Nanny Dodds almost found us there when she came out to hunt some eggs for an extra cake—Mother had already baked three cakes, but she said she had better bake four to make sure there’d be plenty.
“Charlie and I had been eating green apples. Mother always allowed us to eat green apples if we put salt on them. But we had been in the orchard and the salt was at the house, so we hadn’t bothered to wait, but had eaten the apples without salt. We thought it was the green apples that were making us sick. As we didn’t want to be dosed with castor oil and maybe have to stay home from preaching next day, we didn’t tell a soul we felt sick.