So the plan to improve the yard suited all but Baby Jim, who wailed long and loud because his ant city would be destroyed. In vain did the family try to comfort him. He could not be persuaded to abandon his flock.
That night, to Jim’s distress, a cold rainfall set in. “My sheeps will all be dwounded,” he wailed! “I meant to make a ’bwella over them!”
“Look here,” said Lora, drawing him up to the sofa beside her. “This is the picture of the inside of an ant-hill. Here is the top door where you see the ants go in, then they go down to this large room, then sideways to this one, then down, down, down.”
Baby Jim’s eyes opened very wide. He seized the book and studied the drawing long and earnestly.
“Your sheep are all down in the rooms now, having a nice Sunday, I think,” continued Lora. “When winter comes and the snow is all over the ground they won’t come up at all. Haven’t you seen them carrying food in to pile up in one of their rooms?”
“O, and my cookies are all down there!” he cried in great delight.
When the man appeared in the morning Baby Jim marched out with an air of importance, and, after surveying the deserted ant-hill, he turned to the man and said, “My sheeps are all gone into the house to bed, so you can clean up their meadow if you want to.”
And thus it was that the Farnum children began a study which will interest them as long as they live. There is no longer any need to worry about their living at the neighbors; and at last the Farnum back-yard has become not only respectable, but actually a “thing of beauty and joy forever.”
Lee McCrae.