“Oh!” said Merrimeg, a little alarmed.
“All you have to do is to have a good time, and leave it to him. He always has to start out each time with a new coach, because the old one is broken to pieces by the time he gets to the end of the road. But the less you think about it the better. Just look at those buttercups in the meadow! I know how to tell whether you like butter.”
The coach sped merrily along, and the little girls chattered gaily. Once there sprang up beside the road an ugly little imp with big ears, who threw a stone after them; but Old Porringer whipped up the ponies, and the stone missed the coach. The little girls laughed.
Merrimeg grew drowsy after a while, with the easy motion of the coach and the soft spring air, and at last she put her head back and went to sleep. She was awakened once by the sound of breaking glass, and she found that a stone had come through a corner of the coach; but it didn’t seem to matter, and she went to sleep again.
The next thing she knew, Myrma was shaking her arm. “We’re going to stop now,” said Myrma, and Merrimeg sat up and rubbed her eyes.
She found she was looking into a mirror, which she hadn’t noticed before, hanging opposite her in the coach. She saw herself in it. She was a grown girl, seemingly about fifteen years old, and her hair was done in a pigtail, and her dress was down to her ankles. She was carrying school-books in her arm.
She wasn’t the least bit surprised, strange to say. It seemed as if she had always been as old as that. She didn’t realize that it must have been years and years since she started on this journey. Could she have been asleep all that time? However, all she was thinking about was, that if you multiplied a + b by a - b, what was the answer? She was about to open one of her school books, when the coach stopped, and they got out before a large building which had a sign on it with the number “15.”
Boys and girls of her own age were going into this building. Myrma followed her in, but Merrimeg quite forgot about her companion. She seemed to know exactly what to do. She walked down a hall and into a schoolroom, and sat down at a desk. Other boys and girls were at their desks, and the teacher, a tall lady with spectacles, was writing with chalk on a blackboard.
Merrimeg felt a tug at her pigtail, and she turned round quickly. The boy at the desk behind her was gazing hard at a book in his hand. He was a jolly-looking boy.
“Did you pull my hair, Peter Prawn?” she said to him, in great indignation.