I think I like Minneapolis better than any place I was ever in. I may go to stay with my uncle and attend the University of Minnesota, which is there. That is what I want to do. If I go I shall know more about Minneapolis, and will write again.
Thomas Bailey Atwood.
THE OSBORNE HOME.
(Character Studies.)
ALL day long the Osborne home had been in a state of excitement. It had been very difficult for the family to attend to its usual duties. The little girls had at first declared that they could not go to school at all; and then, being convinced that they must, it had been nearly impossible to get them ready in time. Even the baby had caught the unrest, and refused to take his long morning nap and give the seventeen-year-old sister Mary a chance to attend to the work. The explanation was that mother was coming home. She had been away a whole month, an unheard-of thing in the history of the family before this season.
The fact is, Mrs. Osborne was one of those mothers who would never have been persuaded to leave her home and her children had it not become a serious duty to do so. She had been in poor health for several months, and grandmamma had written and coaxed and urged, and at last almost commanded that she should come back to the old home and the old physician, and see if he could not help her. One terrible thing about it was, that this same physician refused to allow her to bring her baby along. “I know just how it will be,” he said, shaking his gray head and looking wise. “The baby is a strong, healthy little fellow, and a perfect tyrant as they all are, and he will be carried, and put to sleep, and fed, and petted by his mother and nobody else; he will be more positive about it than usual, being among strangers, and he will just keep her worn out. There is no use in talking, Mrs. Fuller, I know your daughter Mary of old, and I will not consent to try to help her unless she will leave that fellow at home and come away from all care for a month.”
Well, the doctor had had his way, as he nearly always did, and Mrs. Osborne, having declared that it would be utterly impossible to go away from home and leave Baby and the little girls, and only Mary to look after them all, had been gotten ready and carried to the cars. And a whole month had passed, and she, wonderfully improved, was coming home to-day. Father had driven to the depot three miles away to meet her, and the house was in commotion.
Mary, the housekeeper, nurse and mother-in-charge, had had a busy day. There were still a dozen things which she meant to have done before mother came, not the least among them being to get herself in order; for her apron was torn, her slippers were down at the heel, her hair was what her father called “frowsly,” and, in short, she did not look in the least as she meant to when the mother should put her arms around her. Then there were last things to be done all over the house, and the table to be set for the early tea-dinner which was to do honor to the traveler’s newly-found appetite. Yet, notwithstanding all this, Mary, feeling sure that the time must now be short, allowed herself to drop down into the chair which she had been dusting, draw from her pocket the mother’s last letter, whose contents she knew by heart, and glancing at it, go to studying for the dozenth time the possibility that her mother might have meant the evening train instead of the afternoon, in which case she would not be there for several hours.
“Let me see; I almost believe that is the way, after all,” she said, biting the feather end of the old quill which she had picked up somewhere in her dusting, and looking vexed and disheartened. “I am sure I don’t know how I am to keep the children from growing wild, if they have to wait three hours longer.”