THE LITTLE RED SHOP.
By Margaret Sidney.
CHAPTER I.
THE old house on Cherryfield high road, back of the row of stiff poplars, with its queer little gnarled apple-trees at the back, looked for all the world just as it did one hundred years ago. It had no more paint on it now than when the children’s grandfather took home his young bride who thought it the most beautiful place in all the world to begin housekeeping in. Then it was a dingy yellow, with faded green blinds; and now the same forlorn attempt at coloring greeted all passers-by. To be sure it had been painted many times in the interim, but always the same hue was chosen, so that to the oldest inhabitant it was the best known landmark for miles around.
The “Brimmer Place” was known too, for something else than its antiquity; it was the cheeriest, home-iest old house that ever stood on any road, overflowing with good-will to everybody, especially to sick people and to little children. If anybody were in trouble and could reach her, Mrs. Brimmer always found just the right word of cheer to speak, while she tried to help in many other ways—and what she didn’t do, why, there were Jack, and Cornelius, and Rosalie, to say nothing of Primrose, the baby—four little comforters who made everybody just happy to look at them. And yet every one who lived in the big, hundred-year-old house was poor.
“It’s most dreadful to be poor,” said Rosalie one morning, in a burst of confidence to the boys, out in the woodshed. Cornelius stopped hacking at an old log to flash her a convincing “no” out of his black eyes.
“And it’s so very unagreeable,” continued Rosalie, smoothing down her apron while she seated herself on one end of the bench.
“Disagreeable, you mean,” corrected Jack, picking up sticks over in the corner. “There, Corny, you let that old fellow alone; I’ll tackle him soon. He’s too tough for you.”
Corny, resenting the implication, let the hatchet fly on the back of the old log to show how strong he was in such a masterful style that the chips flew in every direction, and Rosalie paused to shake them from her apron, before she said,