“But you’d better fly back to that mush,” said Mother Brimmer presently, “and get breakfast as you’d ought to, and not look ahead to to-morrow. That’ll take care of itself.”
“So it will!” cried Rosy merrily.
Jack and Cornelius, now hurrying in to breakfast, the small maid-of-all-work had to desert her delightful anticipations of to-morrow’s good times and fly to the work in hand. It was presently on the table—the steaming dish of mush, the baked potatoes, and the large pitcher of milk, and Mother Brimmer being summoned from her work, wiped her hands, took off her apron, and joined the others at their simple meal.
For the good woman, although her children were “in business and doing for themselves,” as she proudly expressed it, observed the same frugality as when times were hard and the future looked dark. “We won’t give up our plain breakfasts; they’ve always done us good, and we don’t need any other food,” she would say when the boys urged her to have a “bit of meat for herself, at least.”
“No, no; I don’t want it,” she said, “mother’s tough and hearty. As long as I’ve such perfect health, you needn’t worry, children.”
So the money that would have gone into the butcher’s till for the beefsteak or mutton chop, went instead into the bank to Brimmer Brothers and Company’s credit.
And the economy observed in the matter of breakfasts went into all the other details of daily life. The only thing in which the family indulged themselves was in the matter of books and magazines; and occasionally Mrs. Brimmer would send the young people off of an evening to a good lecture or concert in the Town Hall, or she would go with some of them, one always being obliged to remain with Roly Poly, who was called “the baby,” although rejoicing in the dignity of five years.
The business conducted by Brimmer Brothers and Company was a grocery and general trade carried on in a little red building on their grounds, that had formerly been an old tool-house, in which the farmer who then lived in the big gray house mended up his farming utensils, and kept his tools when he had done the jobs. The business was started because the little money left by Father Brimmer when he died had, despite all the watchful care of it, dwindled till now there was only a pittance left. The old weather-beaten house would last them their lifetime, and the ground was theirs, but the growing family would need more each year to support them, and make them able to take their proper place in the world. And the children, who had silently worried over the problem, how to help the mother they had seen working for them early and late ever since they could remember, were at last one day helped out by the little old red tool-house.
“Here I am,” it seemed to say. “Your mother has given me to you for a play-house; now use me to help her.”
It was an inspiration in the first of it, to be followed by hard and grinding work, much of it in the face of half-laughing opposition and downright sneers of friends and townsfolk. But Brimmer Brothers and Company having begun to face the world never once thought of shirking any of the duties which they met there, but just the same as if everybody believed that they could make a success of the business, they determined in their own minds to do so, and behaved accordingly. And Rosy, the most timid little thing before strangers, forgot all her fears now, and as Company of the new concern developed a resoluteness and self-possession that amazed the boys.