THE LITTLE HOUSE ORGAN.
“What shall we do?” asked Nettie, looking perplexed, and standing jug in hand in the middle of the room. “Jerry won’t be home in time to get it, and I can’t leave those cakes to bake themselves; mother, you don’t think you could see to them a little while till I run to the grocery, do you?”
Mrs. Decker shook her head, but spoke sympathetically: “I’d do it in a minute, child, or I’d go for the molasses, but these shirts are very particular; I never had such fine ones to iron before, and the irons are just right, and if I should have to leave the bosoms at the wrong minute to look at the cakes, why, it would spoil the bosoms; and on the other hand, if I left the cakes and saved the bosoms, why, they would be spoiled.”
This seemed logical reasoning. Susie, perched on a high chair in front of the table, was counting a large pile of pennies, putting them in heaps of twenty-five cents each. She waited until her fourth heap was complete, then looked up. “Why don’t you ask me to go?”
“Sure enough!” said Nettie, laughing, “I’d ‘ask’ you in a minute if it didn’t rain so hard; but it seems a pretty stormy day to send out a little chicken like you.”
“I’m not a chicken, and I’m not in the leastest bit afraid of rain; I can go as well as not if you only think so.”
“I don’t believe it will hurt her!” said Mrs. Decker, glancing doubtfully out at the sullen sky. “It doesn’t rain so hard as it did, and she has such a nice thick sack now.”
It was nice, made of heavy waterproof cloth, with a lovely woolly trimming going all around it. Susie liked that sack almost better than anything else in the world. Her mother had bought it second-hand of a woman whose little girl had outgrown it; the mother had washed all day and ironed another day to pay for it, and felt the liveliest delight in seeing Susie in the pretty garment.
The rain seemed to be quieting a little, so presently the young woman was robed in sack and waterproof bonnet with a cape, and started on her way.
Half-way to the grocery she met Jerry hastening home from school with a bag of books slung across his shoulder.