The Project Gutenberg eBook, Six Girls and Bob, by Marion Ames Taggart, Illustrated by William F. Stecher

SIX GIRLS AND BOB

BOOKS BY

MARION AMES TAGGART

THE SIX GIRLS SERIES

SIX GIRLS AND BOB. A Story of Patty-Pans and Green Fields. 330 pages. SIX GIRLS AND THE TEA ROOM. A Story. 316 pages. SIX GIRLS GROWING OLDER. A Story. 331 Pages. SIX GIRLS AND THE SEVENTH ONE. A Story. 358 pages. BETTY GASTON, THE SEVENTH GIRL. A Story. 352 pages. SIX GIRLS AND BETTY. A Story. 320 pages. SIX GIRLS GROWN UP. A Story. 343 pages.
These volumes are attractively illustrated and bound uniformly. Price, $1.50 each.

["THIS SUNNY LITTLE MAIDEN WAS BENDING ABSORBED OVER THE GAS RANGE"]

SIX GIRLS AND BOB

A STORY OF PATTY-PANS
AND GREEN FIELDS

BY

MARION AMES TAGGART

Author of "The Little Grey House," "The Wyndham Girls," "Miss Lochinvar," etc.

ILLUSTRATED BY

WILLIAM F. STECHER

W. A. WILDE COMPANY
BOSTON CHICAGO

Copyright, 1906

By W. A. Wilde Company

All rights reserved

—

Six Girls and Bob

To Gertrude
In Loving Remembrance

CONTENTS

[ILLUSTRATIONS]

[SIX GIRLS AND BOB]

[CHAPTER I]
THE FOURTH FLOOR, EAST

"How can you get twelve feet into eight feet, no matter how good you are in arithmetic?" asked Happie Scollard, a trifle impatiently.

"You'd have to be pretty poor in arithmetic to try it. Even home-taught children ought to know something about putting greater into lesser," observed Bob. "Would you mind telling us what you're driving at, Keren-happuch, my dear?"

Happie groaned. "This room is quite squeedged enough with us six Scollards in it, without crowding in my dreadful name, Robert, my dear," she retorted. "What I was driving at was a harmless little humorous joke. This kitchen is eight feet wide, and we have twelve feet, we six, haven't we? I was wishing we had more space to stand on; that's all."

"That's right; always make humorous jokes," approved Bob. "I've heard lots of jokes that hadn't a touch of humor. Yours isn't so very—but never mind! You know we needn't put all the twelve feet into the eight. This room is nine feet long. What's the matter with putting a few of our feet down the length of it? Say seven of the twelve, for instance?"

Happie laughed. "I hadn't thought of dividing them that way," she said. "But the worst of standing any of your feet lengthwise of the room is that it brings some of you in between the range and the sink, and then I can't stir the fudge. Though to be sure if you all stand widthwise I can't get to the closet."

"How could you put seven one way and five the other? They'd have to go in twos, because we've each got two feet, don't you see?" asked Polly suddenly. She had been turning Bob's suggestion over in her mind and had announced her discovery with her usual serious manner. In all her nine years of life with her nonsense-loving elder brother and sisters, Polly had not learned that they were not always to be taken literally.

"Good for you, pretty Polly!" exclaimed Bob. "I believe you're right! And you know how many are left when you take seven from twelve, don't you? What's the matter with Happie? Isn't she all right?"

"This is a dear little kitchen, Happie. We all said so when we came to look at the flat! And we were so glad it was sunny!" said Margery, the sweet seventeen years-old sister who mothered the little band during their mother's daily absence.

"I'm still glad, sweet Peggy," said Happie. "But when we looked at the flat, we didn't realize how very tiny this kitchen was—we hadn't put the saucepans and things into the cupboard, you see! But I'm not breaking my vows. I'm still thankful that we have our funny, cozy little drawn-out fourth floor home. But it is a little kitchen for six, and everybody always packs into it when I make fudge."

"You ought to be flattered," said Bob. "How is it coming on this time?"

"Not as fast as usual; there isn't much pressure on the gas," replied Happie, lifting her pan to peer anxiously at the fragrant brown mass it held.

She was a pretty creature, not with a regular and easily defined prettiness, but with a charm of feature, coloring and expression that was more potent than orthodox beauty. She had brown hair, that in the shade looked the color of a ripe chestnut. In the sun it turned a splendid copper color, as if the chestnut had blazed up in the brazier. It was hair all crinkles and wrinkles, trying to curl as nature meant it to, and as its owner distinctly meant it not to curl. It waved around rosy cheeks in which the dimples came and went so fast that they looked as if they too were curly, like the hair, and it shaded brown eyes that could laugh and flash and cloud sorrowfully, but which ordinarily shone with a warm, steady light that put one in mind of a glowing hearth fire. Happie could not have had a more appropriate name than her nickname, for she was a veritable ray of sunshine, brave and cheerful and unselfish, good with that natural tendency to noble aims and thoughts that seems in rare natures to be at one with the tendency of flowers to clothe themselves in fragrance and beauty. She could get angry, and sometimes did, but she never could do unkind or mean things; she was a loyal, pure-hearted, clever little woman of fourteen, with so many talents that she had no special one, and her mother felt that when the time came for her to earn her bread, as all the Scollards must do, it might be hard to decide for what too-versatile Happie was best fitted.

Just now [this sunny little maiden was bending absorbed over the gas range], her face decidedly red, her sweet lips deserving the epithet for purely external reasons, as well as for their pleasant curves, while her right hand stirred the mixture in a pan which her left hand slightly lifted above the circular blue flame.

Margery—Margaret—reclined against the drop shelf which was the space-economizing substitute for a kitchen table. She was a graceful young creature, with a serious look on her madonna-like face, brought there by her early acquaintance with responsibility and anxiety.

Bob, next to Margery in seniority, sat astride of the only chair the tiny kitchen admitted. A fine, square-shouldered specimen of a boy nearing sixteen he was; open-browed, bright-eyed, overflowing with fun, yet with a certain steadiness of manner that spoke him trustworthy, as became a boy who had been left the head of a family by his father's death four years before.

Laura, Happie's successor in the birth record of the family Bible, toyed elegantly with a fork, but cast rapid, furtive glances at the fudge, betraying the shallowness of the indifference which an over-weening sense of the dignity of her twelve years impelled her to assume. She was a pale, thin girl, with a discontented and sensitive mouth, and an abundance of foolish affectations that made her seem like an alien among the cheerful, sensible young Scollards.

Mary—Polly, as she was always called, was the most stolidly sensible little creature of the family. A round-faced, broad-browed, sweet-tempered, plump little body was Polly, never in anybody's way, always to be relied upon for an errand, very fond of housewifely tasks of which she assumed her full share in the household, though she boasted but nine years of age.

Penelope, baby Penny, ended the Scollard list, winding up the ranks at four years, an imaginative, lively little person, not prone to scrapes, but fond of mischief, and with an ability to amuse and to take care of herself remarkable, considering there were five older children ready and glad to spoil her with petting.

The sensitive, delicate mother of this flock had been left a widow when Penny was a wee baby. There had been nothing for her gifted, impractical husband to leave her but the memory of a perfect love and a beautiful life, spent rather in the pursuit of ideals than of money. Without a murmur this woman, strong of soul, though weak of body, had taken up the burden of her profound grief and the support of her children. She had many accomplishments, and her knowledge of languages stood her in good stead. Every day she journeyed down the subway from her fourth floor nest in an up-town apartment house, and earned her own and her children's bread as the foreign correspondent of a large firm, coming back weary every night during the hardest hours of the crowded subway travel to her flat, where, after the dinner which her children had prepared, she spent each evening giving them the lessons for which she could no longer afford teachers. It was not strange that the Scollards worshiped their mother with the love she so richly deserved, the love of recognition of a noble woman, as well as the natural love of children for their mother.

Happie's fudge boiled up suddenly, and suddenly Laura spoke, breaking a silence that had lasted for several minutes.

"I think I should like to be called Laure," she said.

"Law! What for?" cried Happie, promptly, blowing away vigorously on the spoonful of fudge which she had taken out to test.

"It's less common than Laura and more musical," said Laura pensively. "Laure sounds elegant."

"It sounds silly," said Polly instantly.

"It sounds as if you could put your finger through it anywhere; I don't like French names for American and English girls," added Happie.

"I like names that sound like beautiful music," said Laura, who really was talented musically, but who was pitiably conscious of the fact. "I was making up the loveliest little song—the sweetest air!—and I was writing the words too. I said:

'She shone afar,
Like a golden star,
My angel Laure.'

And then I had to stop, because it ought to have been Laura, and Laure wouldn't have rhymed. If only it was Laure now——"

"It wouldn't have rhymed, even if it had been," interrupted Happie, not too patiently. "Can't you hear that afar and star don't rhyme with Laure?"

"And what's the matter with writing songs and poems to some other girl beside yourself?" suggested Bob. "You might have said: 'My angel Bar,' for instance, and pretended the angel's name was Barbara. For goodness' sake, don't be a goose, Laura! You're nearly in your 'teens, as you so often remind us, and you ought to stop being so sentimental."

"You're not musical, Bob," said Laura, so pityingly, and with such an air of shedding light on the whole question that they all shouted.

"Fudge's done!" announced Happie triumphantly, giving a few last, furious beats to the mixture turning delightfully thick and sugary in the pan. "Bring on the pans, Polly, and, Bob, will you put it out on the fire escape till it gets cool enough to go on the ice without melting our entire stock? I've got to rest and cool my face."

Her lieutenants meekly obeyed, and Happie dropped on the chair which Bob vacated, fanning herself vigorously with a paper.

"I hope you haven't harmed your complexion, child," said Margery with her elder sisterly air, as she surveyed Happie's flaming cheeks.

"Fireproof!" Happie replied carelessly. "Sunproof and freckleproof too; you know I never burn or freckle as you do, Margery. That comes of having golden hair and peach blossom tints. I'm betwixt and between—coloring, age, height, cleverness, looks, everything, so I just slip through, and nothing touches me. I don't care! I like being fourteen and not having to think of skin or anything! I'd rather change places with Penny than with you, Peggy, but the worst of it is in three years I'll be as old as you are now."

"I like to feel that I am almost a young lady," said Margery placidly, surveying with entire satisfaction the hem of her dress resting on the floor as she leaned against the shelf. "I believe it is interesting to be grown-up. At least I ought to be of more use to motherkins then. And I should like to have a pretty house and entertain people beautifully, so they'd be perfectly happy visiting me." And pretty Margery sighed involuntarily, remembering the small flat which was her home, and which promised no gratification of her hospitable instincts.

"I shouldn't care for that," said Laura, taking up the theme with the readiness to discuss grown-up plans all little girls feel. "It doesn't mean much, just to entertain! What I should want would be to give people something better than dinners and visits. I mean to sing to people, my own songs, and play to them my own music and all the other composers'——"

"Why so modest, Laura? Why don't you say all the other great composers?" inquired Bob blandly, withdrawing his head from the window, having deposited the pans of fudge on the fire escape. "If it comes to swapping ambitions, mine is to go to college, and it looks as if I could go, now doesn't it? So Robert the Impatient, must make the best of it."

"And of himself," added Margaret with her gentle smile, and the half motherly look that made her grown-up air and elder sisterly manner very attractive.

"I'm going to have a hospital for hurt cats and dogs," announced Polly.

"I believe you will," laughed Happie. "I have so many dreams I couldn't possibly say which was my pet one, but I suppose I'll just amount to nothing, but keep house for all of you when you want to come home between doing great deeds."

"Oh, you!" said Bob decidedly. "You don't have to do great things; you're all right just being Happie! I guess you're sure to do great things and never find it out."

"Yes," added Margery, lovingly. "You are not only Happie yourself, you know, but you are our happiness—that's what mother says, and I wish it could be said of me."

"Base flattery!" said Happie shaking her shining head. "It doesn't have to be said of you, dear, because it's plain to be seen. I believe I'd like a chicken farm when I grow up."

"Yes, and grow broilers for the market, and take to your bed every time one had its head cut off—I think I see you!" cried Bob. "No country, nor farming for me anyway. I want college, and then business among people. Wouldn't I hate to live where I drove down once a day to get the mail and to 'see the flyer go through,' as they used to up at Pennyroyal last year? Do you remember how they used to talk about that express train? And how they would talk horse while they waited for it? No, sir; no country for me. I'd rather go to sea."

"The country is beautiful, but I should hate to give up all the city advantages," said Margery thoughtfully.

"Why there wouldn't be any concerts, nor anything in the country!" exclaimed Laura. "And who could you play and sing to? They would rather hear that awful tune the man sings to the trained bears, and plays on that horrid little pipe the poor things dance to! Why, I'd die if I lived in the country!"

"I never knew, the Scollards had Irish blood, 'my angel Laure,' but that was a bull all right," said Bob.

"Well, I should die after I'd lived there long enough for it to kill me," maintained Laura stoutly. And she could not see why her brother and sisters laughed.

"I think mother looks as if she would be better if we could live in the country," said Margery, her face clouding with anxiety. "She looks so tired lately it worries me dreadfully."

"She couldn't support us in the country, she says, and a suburb costs more than a flat, adding fare and coal to the rent," said Bob. "I too think the blessed woman is not up to the mark, Margery."

"Ah, don't!" cried Happie sharply. "Where is Penny? I just missed her."

"'Way in the front with Dorée," said Polly. "She's watching somebody moving in. There is a van at the door. I guess she couldn't have smelled the fudge."

"I think so, too, Polly," laughed Happie. "My goodness, that clock's stopped! It must be time we were getting dinner! Go see what time it is, Polly, please."

"Quarter to six!" Polly called back from the middle of the flat. "They're taking in a basket that looks as if it had a cat in it; I wonder if it's yellow, too?"

The "too" of Polly's remark referred to the Scollards' own beloved kitten, as yellow as a golden nugget, and named Jeunesse Dorée, obviously from his color.

Margery and Happie did not stop to bestow a passing thought upon the new inmates of the house, their fellow flat-dwellers, nor their cat, but sprang to get out the agate saucepans for their cooking, and to hurry away the implements of fudge-making, for it was fifteen minutes past their time for beginning to get dinner, and they prided themselves on not keeping their mother waiting when she came home at night from her hard day's work.

Happie enveloped herself in an ample apron and fell to peeling potatoes as if her life depended on getting them out of their jackets in a twinkling. Margery quietly, but speedily, put the meat in its pan and floured it delicately, then knelt before the oven, lighted its burners and slid the pan into place, devoutly hoping that the tenants on the lower floors would not require so much gas for their dinners that night as to lower the pressure and retard further the Scollards' tardy roasting.

Just behind her was the door of the dumb waiter, with the mouth-piece of its whistle beside it. From this whistle there suddenly issued a blood-curdling shriek, and Margery tumbled over backward, while Happie jumped to her feet, upsetting potatoes, peelings, pan of water and all on the spotless floor.

"Oh, that fearful whistle!" Happie cried, crimson with anger and the reaction from her fright. "If I lived here nine hundred and ninety-nine years, I never should get used to it!"

"Nor I," murmured Margery feebly, scraping up Happie's scattered peelings with the knife she had dropped, not rising, but turning her discomfiture to profit as she sat. "It's so sharp and so sudden!"

"They ought to blow softly to announce that they are going to blow hard," suggested Bob, as he opened the door to answer the summons. But he had jumped himself.

"It may be a waiter, but it's certainly not a dumb waiter," observed Happie, pursuing a truant potato to the corner by the ice box.

"It makes me perfectly blasé," sighed Laura, holding her side as she took the napkins from their drawer.

"Blasé! Oh, Laura, when will you learn to use words right, or to use only those you understand?" laughed Margery pulling herself up by the back of the chair.

Bob was leaning down the dumb waiter shaft, and a voice arose from its depths.

"Groc'ries fer you!" it called in the unspellable accent of New York's east side.

"I guess not," Bob called back. "Wrong whistle."

"From Lichtenzeit's," insisted the voice.

"No," called Bob.

"Top floor. Gordon," the voice shouted angrily. And as Bob leaned down further to explain that he was a Scollard, the dumb waiter began to ascend with rapid clatter, and further parley was impossible.

"It's not only not dumb, Happie, but it's not even a waiter," said Bob turning away with a disgusted expression. "You see it's coming up without waiting to find out where it's going. There isn't any one in the house named Gordon."

The waiter stopped with a rattle of its ropes, and the voice below called up: "Take 'em off; they're fer you."

"Look here, you chump," called Bob. "They're not mine. There isn't a Gordon in this whole house." But as he spoke the door across from the Scollards opened, and a boy appeared, grinning cheerfully at his neighbor.

"You're not quite right there, old man," he said. "There is a Gordon in the house, and I'm he. I'm one of him, at least—there's another, and their mother. All right; I've got the stuff. Go ahead. Farewell, vale, ta ta. Blow the left hand whistle next time."

The new boy straightened himself from delivering these last remarks down the waiter-shaft and smiled anew at Bob. "We've just moved in. The last of our household effects are even now bumping the paper off the front hall—the van men find them bulky. Hope we'll meet again." He cast his eye beyond Bob into the sunny kitchen where pretty Margery and Happie were working like stingless bees.

"All right. Hope so, too," said Bob. And the doors shut simultaneously on both sides of the dumb waiter.

"He looks the right sort," observed Bob.

"I'm sorry the flat across is let, though. It has been such a rest not having the men blow our whistle for the one over there," sighed Margery.

Happie had beaten up a cake to be eaten with her blanc mange of the morning's making. She was pouring the mixture into her sheet of cup-shaped tins, and was not interested in the subject of new neighbors. She paused with her bowl held sidewise in the air, and with her spoon resting on its side as she guided the yellow mixture into its destination. "I've got it!" she exclaimed jubilantly.

"Eureka, Keren-happuch, my dear," corrected Bob. "What have you got?"

"The name for our flat," said Happie. The Scollards had been trying ever since they had taken possession of it to find a name for their habitation, "because," Happie explained, "all residences of any account had names, and she wanted her estate to be no exception."

"What is it?" asked Margery, and Laura paused in the doorway with the bread plate in her hand to hear the answer.

"Patty-pans!" cried Happie triumphantly. "Don't you see that it is exactly what the flat is like?" She held up her baking tins to illustrate. "See," she went on, "how the rooms come along, one after the other, just precisely like these patty-pan cups? This is The Patty-Pans, or Patty-Pans-on-the-Hudson—only a few blocks off, at any rate, and that doesn't matter!"

"It's the very thing!" cried Bob appreciatively, and Margery laughed and agreed.

"It's not at all pretty," said Laura, whose sense of humor was defective. But she got no further with her objection. The little electric bell on the wall rang thrice, and all the Scollards in the rear rushed through the narrow hall, and were met at the door by Polly from the front, and Penny with Dorée in her arms.

This triple ring meant that the children's real day, the only part of the day in which the sun fully shone for them, although it began after sunset, had dawned, for it announced their mother's home-coming at night.

[CHAPTER II]
FIRE, AND OTHER ESCAPES

One's mother never has the appearance of any particular age. She does not look precisely young, because hers is the face to which our baby eyes are raised for comfort and guidance, it is from her that we receive and hope for all things. So it is impossible to realize that she is quite young. On the other hand the familiar, beloved face never wears the look of age, no matter how wrinkled it be, nor how far we have traveled from childhood. It is too dear, too perfectly the spring that quenches our thirst for unfailing love ever to look to us withered and age-stricken as it must to strangers. The young Scollards had never stopped to consider whether their mother was quite elderly, or very youthful—her age was swallowed up in the fact of her motherhood. In reality Charlotte Scollard was but just approaching the milestone of the fourth decade. She was a pale, slenderly built woman, with a worn, sweet face, like Margery's, but older and saddened. It wore a look of ill-health which her children saw too frequently to recognize fully, though the three eldest half perceived it at times, with a tightening of fear around their hearts.

Polly and Penny clung around their mother's waist as she entered, Bob and Margery encircled her from each side with their loving arms, while Happie hugged her breathless, and Laura vainly strove for an opening for her own welcome.

"Such a dear little home! Such joy to get home to you, my blessings!" said the mother, as she said each night. "Have you been good and happy all this day?"

She went into the front room which was that nondescript allowed by flat life, neither drawing-room, library nor living-room, but a little of each. It was a pretty room, made so by its furnishing of books and pictures, and the mother looked about her, feeling anew that it was well worth the effort that taxed her slender strength to the utmost to maintain this nest and her nestlings within it.

"We've found a name for the flat at last, motherkins!" cried Happie, as she removed her mother's hat pins, while Laura and Margery unbuttoned her coat, and the two least girls pulled off a glove from each hand.

"Happie has," corrected Margery. "It's a nice, cozy, funny little name, just like this family."

"Tell me," smiled Mrs. Scollard.

"Patty-Pans!" announced Happie triumphantly. "I thought of it when I was pouring my cake into the cup pans. Don't you know that these flats are precisely like a patty-pan, every room following after and joining on to the next one the way the cups do in those sheets?"

"I see the resemblance." Mrs. Scollard laughed, and the weariness went out of her face for the moment as her eyes danced. "Shall we have a die cut for our letter paper: 'Patty-Pans,' and printed in bright silver like new tins? Only I'm afraid our correspondents might think that all our letters should be dated April first!"

"And the flat across is rented; the family came in to-day," Bob said, adding his information to the small fund of entertainment which it was the children's custom to amass daily for their mother's return.

"Oh, me! I hope they are not people who will play the piano all the evening when we are at our lessons!" Mrs. Scollard sighed, remembering past troubles.

"Two big boys and their mother; I guess not," said Bob succinctly. "The one we saw across the dumb waiter looked a good sort, and full of fun. I got home to-day earlier, mother. Mr. Felton told me that if you would agree to letting me come for all day he would make it worth our while."

"I am glad to hear that, Bob; it shows that he likes you. But I will never consent to giving you up for all day to earning, leaving no time for your studies, until we are absolutely driven to it. As long as I can earn enough to support us all—with strict economy, to be sure, but enough—I will not let my only son lose his chance for an education. Half a day is all that I will let you spend at the office, dear Bob. But thank Mr. Felton for me; tell him I am glad indeed that he thinks you worth having all day. Now, I must get ready for dinner. I hope it is very good and abundant, lassies, for I am pitiably hungry." Mrs. Scollard rose as she spoke, and pulled aside the sliding-door at the end of the room. It led into her own chamber, lighted by the glass in this door, the second room of the series of seven, arranged, as Happie had discovered, in true patty-pan order.

The girls ran through to the kitchen to serve the dinner, while Penny and Dorée lingered with the mother, waiting for the special petting to which, as the baby, Penny was entitled.

"I always think of how the girls in Little Women got ready for their mother to come home, don't you? When we are waiting for our marmee, I mean," said Happie, arranging her little cakes on the delicate Limoges plate. "They swept up the hearth and put their mother's slippers down to warm. I don't think flats are really homes; you can't do that kind of comfy, homey things in a flat."

"But our mother can come home just as truly, and that is the only important thing. We are fortunate to have a home," said Margery, with a suggestion of reproach in her voice.

"Mercy! Don't I know it," retorted Happie. "But won't you be glad when we are able to make a home for mother instead of her making one for us?"

"Next winter I shall do something towards it," said Margery in a tone of quiet conviction. "You will be old enough to keep house then without my help."

"I'd rather be the one to go out; I'm better fitted for it," said Happie. "Dinner is served, Mrs. Scollard, mum," she added, putting her head out of the dining-room door, and calling down the three-foot hall which carried sound like a tunnel.

Mrs. Scollard did not prove her own assertion as to her appetite. The children, anxiously watching her, saw her taste her food, and push it away uneaten, telegraphing their uneasiness to one another as she did so.

"You said you were hungry, dear Deceiver," Happie reproached her at last.

"I was, dear; I felt as if I could not wait for my dear girls' good things, but when I see them I cannot eat, although I appreciate the perfect seasoning, and how fortunate I am in my cooks." Mrs. Scollard laughed a little as she spoke, and her eyes rested lovingly on Margery and Happie, but she only broke a corner of one of the golden patty-pan cakes, and took bird-like tastes of the delicate blanc mange. It seemed to the older girls and Bob that the pallor of her face, the shadows under her eyes, the droop of her lips had never been so apparent.

Before they had time to dwell on the thought and what it might portend, there came a great clatter from the kitchen, and Dorée flew into the dining-room with his golden fur so electrified that he looked like a four-legged sunflower, with very little difference in his size and shape at any point.

"What under the canopy——" Bob began, jumping up from the table and running out, followed by his sisters.

Somebody was hammering madly on the dumb waiter door with a competent stick. Bob opened the door emphatically, and there, in the opposite doorway, stood the boy whom they had seen in the afternoon, his stick raised for further pounding, but with a broad smile on his face that did not suggest anything in the least malicious.

"Say, what's the matter with you?" demanded Bob.

"Would you be so very kind as to return our cat?" asked the boy with exaggerated mildness.

"We haven't got your cat; that's ours," said Bob, pointing over his shoulder to where Jeunesse Dorée was standing sniffing the situation with greatly elongated body, having returned to investigate what had frightened him, with true feline nervous courage and curiosity.

"'Tis true, my lord, and pity 'tis 'tis true,'" returned the boy. "For that's a beauty cat. Ours is merely a cat of many colors, but we are fond of him. He is on your fire escape, having leaped across from this one. From the sounds I have heard, I think he has upset a pan of something, though it's too dark for me to see."

"Oh, my fudge!" cried Happie, and threw up the window.

A tiger cat immediately jumped into the kitchen, to Dorée's intense disapproval, and Happie fished her pan of fudge from between the slats of the fire escape floor, where it had lodged, caught by the transverse slats on its way down to the ground. The candy bore the unmistakable imprint of the tiger cat's "paddy-paw" feet, and Happie surveyed it with chagrin, while Polly stroked the interloper, and Penny clasped struggling Dorée to her breast, to prevent his manifest intention to punish his neighbor.

"Was it your fudge? I'm awfully sorry," said the boy across. "I guess Whoop-la sat in it."

"I guess so too," returned Happie with a laugh. "It's hard luck after broiling one's face to make it. Hard luck for you, too, because we'd have offered you some if it hadn't been spoiled."

"That's noble of you, but I'm afraid you wouldn't, because I shouldn't have knocked on your dumb waiter door, and so we wouldn't have met if Whoop-la hadn't gone over. That is, we shouldn't have met till after you had eaten up all the fudge. Of course we were bound to scrape acquaintance. Would you mind handing me Whoop-la?" The boy bowed as he spoke, and his eyes laughed in spite of his preternaturally solemn manner.

"Such a name for a cat!" exclaimed Bob. He picked up the tiger cat and passed him across to his master, leaning well over the ledge of the dumb waiter to do so. "Suppose you come around to see us tonight," Bob suggested. "We generally study and recite evenings, but to-night is Saturday, and a holiday. Won't you come?"

"I suppose the correct thing is for you to call on me first, you being the oldest—no, the older inhabitant, but I'll waive ceremony. I'd better waive it, because there isn't anything in this flat but bedlam—boxes and chairs you can't tell apart, burlap, and excelsior. I couldn't very well ask you over. My mother and younger brother haven't come yet, so I'm a little lonely. I will come around, if you don't mind, and thank you for asking me." The boy received his cat with hands so considerate of cat-nerves that the Scollard girls, noting, approved of him at once.

"Just give us time to scurry the dishes away," laughed Happie. "We're are own servants, and we couldn't entertain you while we were at work. Give us half an hour for finishing up, and then come."

"It would entertain me very much to watch you work," said this queer boy, "but I'll wait. Good-bye for thirty harrowing minutes. My watch goes fast; you won't mind?"

The Scollards laughed as Bob shut the dumb waiter door.

"He's a character," cried Bob, elated at the prospect of his visitor.

Mrs. Scollard bore off Penny to bed, which she shared with her mother, and lying down beside the baby for her nightly story-telling, fell asleep beside her from sheer exhaustion.

Margery, Happie and Laura washed and wiped the dishes, and Polly put them away, with Bob's help for the higher closet shelves. They worked so fast that only twenty of the thirty minutes were consumed by the task. They were rather excited by the coming of a caller of their own age. Their mother discouraged them from making acquaintances lightly. Living, as they did, in a neighborhood of low rents and crowded apartment-houses, she feared for them contact with young minds less carefully shielded from the knowledge of evil than their own, dreaded their possible contact with manners and morals such as she would not have had them imitate.

Happie's bright hair was curly and moist around her temples from the hasty dash of water which she had thrown over her face, and Margery was daintily drying her fingers one by one when the bell rang, so prompt was the new boy in keeping his appointment to the moment. Polly opened the door for him, and in he walked, hailed by a shout of laughter from Bob which brought the girls in at once, although Margery was conscious of lingering dampness around her little finger.

The new boy had made a label for himself of a box cover, and on it he had written his name, "Ralph Gordon," in very bold letters for all who ran to read. This improvement upon a visiting card he had hung around his neck, so that there could not be an instant's doubt as to whom the Scollards were entertaining.

"Now if you'd only stand by the dumb waiter whistles in the cellar with that thing on, we'd never be troubled with your groceries as we were to-day," said Bob, shaking hands with the arrival. "Wait a minute. You've set the example of labor-saving introductions; I'll follow it. Here, girls, draw up in line, oldest first, and so on. Now, this, Mr.—let's see, oh, yes! Mr. Ralph Gordon——" Bob pretended to be near-sighted, and to consult Ralph's card at short range. "This, Mr. Ralph Gordon, is my oldest and elder sister, Margery, christened Margaret. This is Keren-happuch, next younger than I. This is Laura, musical at twelve. This is pretty Polly, Polly-put-the-kettle on, my sensible, reliable sister of nine. Penny, you can't see because she is in bed. She's the baby, and we consider her a bright Penny, a fairly new one, for she's only four years old, and we wouldn't give her for a five dollar gold piece, as some people do bright new pennies. I am Robert, 'Robert toi qui j'aime'—you know the air? I have only to mention that the last named Scollard is the flower of the family, and my duty's done."

"Fully," commented Margery, with her gentle smile. "We would not say that he is not a flower, but the flower—well, that's another matter."

"Yes," said Ralph with a little look at Margery that held the value of a compliment.

"Quite another matter. He's not a violet, anyway, because that's a modest flower. But what did he call you?" he added turning to Happie.

Happie laughed. "Did you ever hear such a name?" she cried. "Keren-happuch. But they mercifully call me Happie. I was named after an old lady, a friend of mother's mother, and she was named after her grandmother. I think they might as well have stopped with her, and not gone on handing down such a fearful name!"

"Well, it is rather a heavy weight," admitted Ralph. "But Happie is enough to make up for it. I suppose it's a case of 'What's the odds as long as you're Happie.' It ought to be a kind of fairy godmother for whom you're named! Sounds like an old lady who was the only one of her pattern, and who showered gifts on mere mortals."

"Miss Keren-happuch Bradbury is the only one of her pattern; you're right there," Bob answered for Happie. "But she's not a fairy godmother. She's as eccentric as she can be, most interesting, and as independent as the Thirteen Colonies on July, 1776; rather mannish in her ways, but very thoroughly a gentlewoman. However, she's not rich, or we suppose she's not, so she can't play fairy godmother very well."

"And we need fairy godmothers," added Happie. "Our dear father didn't know how to get rich, and when he died, four years ago, poor little mother had to take his place. She's such a frail, delicate little Charlotte-mother! It's not easy. We are all pining for the day when she won't have to work for us, but we can work for her. How she goes down in town every morning to an office. We keep house alone. Bob is in a real estate office in the forenoon, but mother insists on his staying at home to study in the afternoon; she is such a learned darling that she gives us all a good education by teaching us at night, though she is tired to death. Isn't she blessed? That's all of us; our history."

Ralph Gordon's humorous face grew grave, and a look of admiration and respect dawned in his laughing eyes. "It's great," he said in boyish commendation of true heroism. "I have a good mother, too," he added. "My father died when Snigs—that's my brother; he's thirteen, and I guess his name's Charley, but of course Snigs is much better—well, when Snigs was three years old and I was five, father died. Mother didn't have much either. She has kept us at school, and managed pretty well—you see she came of good old fighting, revolutionary stock, and she never dipped her colors once, though she had enough to discourage her. She means me to go to college—she has gone without everything she could give up to save enough to start me, and for the rest I am to help myself through. She has moved up here thinking she could rent a room or so in this flat to some of the boys up there at Columbia, and so get on better until I start, which can't be for two years more. I guess my mother is stronger, more able to bear her burdens than yours is, from what you say, but I've got my hat off to my mother, too, every time. Talk about women's rights! They're about as near right as they can be, rights or not, and when there's anything to be done they don't fall far behind men in pluck and stick-to-it-iveness, I notice."

"Hear, hear!" cried Margery and Happie. "We're much obliged."

"Don't mention it," said Ralph generously. "I hope you will live up to my high opinion."

"I wonder if your cat—Whoop-la, isn't it?—got into both pans of fudge, Happie?" suggested Margery.

"Sure enough!" cried Happie departing on this hint, as Ralph exclaimed: "Thank goodness, you are beginning to prove yourself worthy of my confidence in your sex!"

Happie returned with a pan of fudge, which she examined carefully under the gaslight, turning it at different angles to make sure that Whoop-la's paws had not touched it.

"I think it's all right," she announced at last. "It would surely show if he had stepped into it."

"Certainly," assented Ralph promptly. "And departing leave behind him, footprints in the bands of line. I see you've marked it off into squares. But if he had stepped on it, N'importe! as we said when I was Minister to Paris. Whoop-la is the cleanest cat on Manhattan Island. He licks each snowy paw till it's free from fleck or flaw."

"Ugh!" shuddered Laura. "How disgusting! Think of eating candy he'd touched with licked paws!"

"Oh, he didn't, Laura!" cried Margery. "He got into one pan, but he missed the other."

"I believe you like nonsense as well as a Scollard—better than Laura and Polly, who worry because it doesn't seem quite sensible," said Happie approving the new boy more and more.

He shook his head reproachfully at Laura and Polly. "Do you not know the full title of this highest form of philosophy, my sisters?" he asked. "It is called: Non sensus sed, defense—us. That means it is not sense but a defense, because it defends us from the horrible fate of being dull. This has been contracted into one English word—nonsense. But the whole title fits better."

Laura stared doubtfully at the lecturer, and Polly gazed at him with round-eyed admiration, while Margery, Bob and Happie chuckled over his fooling, beginning to suspect that this merry-looking boy with the queer ways was decidedly clever.

"Pretty good fudge, Sister Keren-happuch; just a suspicion too sugary, but I can use it," said Bob, helping himself to a corner piece, and devouring it with the same relish he had shown for its three predecessors.

"Same here!" remarked Ralph, following Bob's example. "It will go."

"So it seems," laughed Happie. "Much obliged."

"And I must do in like manner," Ralph supplemented his preceding remark, rising. "I am tired with the effort of superintending the van men and moving things around after they had gone. I felt tired enough to dread the evening all alone in the lunatic asylum our place looks like to-night. So I'm no end grateful to you for taking me off my own hands. Hope you'll all come to see me. Next time maybe we'll get at music—I play the violin and the mandolin a little, and I see some one fiddles and pianos here."

"Bob plays the violin, but Laura is our musical girl; we all sing more or less, and better or worse," said Happie. "Please come again. I'm sorry you couldn't see mother for she is—well, you will see her by and by."

She held out her honorably burnt little right hand, which had been scalded that night by the gravy, and Ralph took it with a look of hearty liking and respect.

"You're all my sort," he said. "I'm mighty glad we're neighbors. You'll like my mother, too, though I say it who should, for I know her better than any one else ever can."

Margery laughed, and shook hands so cordially that Bob and Happie knew that Ralph had accomplished the difficult feat of winning reserved Margery's approval in his first visit.

"We've had cat escapes, fudge escapes, loneliness escapes, formality escapes, all turning on Whoop-la on your fire escape," said Ralph. "We ought to sing, 'For We Are Jolly Good Fellows,' in parting, but I'm afraid we should disturb your mother and wake up your Penny. Good-bye, and heaps of thanks."

"Hold on; I'll get my top coat and glasses, and take you home in my automobile," said Bob, opening the door, and shaking hands with his new friend across the narrow hall as Ralph fitted his key into the door opposite. "You won't wait? Good-night, then, and drop over as often as you can, unceremoniously, like your intelligent Whoop-la."

"He's all right," he added to the girls as he closed the door of Patty-Pans.

[CHAPTER III]
KEREN-HAPPUCH, THE FIRST

"Not any more coffee, dear," Mrs. Scollard said, pushing back her chair from the breakfast table.

"You have hardly eaten a thing, motherkins," protested Happie in a worried voice.

"One cannot always be a credit to one's family cook, Hapsie," returned her mother. "My appetite has been mislaid somewhere between here and the city hall, in the subway, I fancy."

"I think it must have gone over to the Gordons' flat, blown the wrong whistle, the way the grocers do," said Happie. "You never in all your life saw any one so hungry as those two boys were last night when we came home from the park."

"You had a good time, didn't you, dear?" Mrs. Scollard smiled at her second daughter, who was smiling over her recollection of the previous afternoon when she and Margery and Laura had been to the Metropolitan Museum with Bob and the two Gordon boys, and to tea afterwards in the Gordon flat, and had laughed every three minutes of the six hours.

"What are you going to do to-day, my house-keepers?"

"Scour our pans, our Patty-Pans," said Happie promptly, before Margery could speak.

"My dear, this little flat will be washed away!" protested her mother, submitting her glove to Polly for buttoning.

"Mother, it truly does need cleaning," said Margery. "You don't see it in real daylight, except on Sunday, but we know! What's the matter?"

Her mother had caught the back of a chair and swayed slightly forward, but stood erect and smiling in an instant, though her face was a shade paler than usual.

"Nothing, dearies; don't look so frightened! There is a shadow that comes over my eyes of late, and for a second I am wiped out of existence, but you see how quickly I come back! Indigestion, probably; it really is nothing."

"How can you have indigestion when you don't eat?" demanded Margery, not at all reassured by her mother's explanation.

"And how could there be digestion when one ate nothing?" retorted her mother. "Now, Margery, don't look like my worried little seventeen-years-old grandmother! I am not ill. Bob! Come, Bob! I am ready for my escort."

Bob appeared struggling with the over-starched buttonhole in his collar, through which his button refused to pass, and with his tie dangling in one hand.

"Oh, say, Margery, come on, like a good sister!" he implored. And Margery "came on," rightly interpreting this as an appeal for aid.

Her soft fingers deftly coaxed the stiff linen over the stud, and tied the four-in-hand into the perfection of knots. Bob picked up his hat, got into the coat which Margery held for him, and offered his mother his arm to escort her as far as the subway station, according to his daily custom, with as fine an air as if the narrowness of the exit did not necessitate her immediately dropping the arm as soon as it was accepted.

Together this mother and son started out every morning, and the pressure of his mother's hand in parting, and the blessing in her sweet eyes as she went bravely away to labor for him and his sisters would have kept Bob safe through whatever temptations might assail him during the day, just as her honest boy's tight hand squeeze sustained the mother through her weary hours.

"We mustn't think about it, Margery," said Happie visibly giving herself a mental shake, as if she were a dog shaking off troubled waters, and answering the unspoken anxiety in her sister's eyes. "We've got to do our part anyway. And it can't be bad—it would be so very bad, so dreadful, if it were bad that it can't be bad at all."

Margery shook her head, and turned away to hide the gathering tears.

"Don't shake your head," protested Happie impatiently. "I can't bear to have people shake their heads! It's worse than saying the most awful thing! Of course she isn't ill, nor going to be! Do you suppose we could live if motherkins were ill? Well, then! That proves she isn't going to be, because it stands to reason we've got to live. Now, let's hurry these dishes away, and clean those rooms, and make motherkins' room particularly spick-and-span, and then we shall feel better."

"You're a comfort, Happie!" said Margery warmly, laying her face for an instant on the girl's bright hair. "No wonder mother says you are Happie, our happiness! You are a perfect tonic. You would be the very one to lead a forlorn hope."

"I'd rather lead a hope that wasn't forlorn," laughed Happie, well satisfied with the result of her effort at cheering Margery. "Just a plain, every-day hopeful hope. Come on, Margery! Polly and Penny, it's dusting time, but you needn't dust, because we're going to sweep, and sweeping one room in a little flat means dust in all. Perhaps Polly can help Laura make beds and get things ready for sweeping."

This busy household of children had each her appointed tasks and even baby Penelope was supposed to be useful.

"I've got to finish a waltz I was composing; I can't do anything till that's done," said Laura. It was not a little trying to find Laura's genius in the way of her fair share of commonplace tasks, but Margery and Happie were used to it, and when Laura would not, why, Laura would not, and there was less than no use in trying to make her see justice.

"I'll sweep one room, while you dust it, and you can sweep the next one, and I'll dust it; that's fair," said Margery watching Laura depart piano-ward with her troubled look of elder-sisterly responsibility, wishing that she could coax Laura into playing fair.

"And begin in mother's," added Happie, tying up her head so tight that her eyebrows mounted a quarter of an inch, the left higher than the right.

Margery's broom flew, and Happie dusted briskly the chairs set out in the parlor; it was something like the old-fashioned game of solitaire with marbles to clean in the Patty-Pan; one had to move pieces about many times before they could be restored to their appointed place. Dorée considered cleaning done solely for his entertainment, and flew after Happie's duster till she and Polly and Penny were in a gale of a frolic with him, and Margery had to come out to hug the little cat, who looked like a dandelion in a high wind, as he raced over the floor.

The two active housewives worked their way into the third little bedroom rapidly, leaving the first two of the Patty-Pan chambers guiltless of dust. Laura tired of her waltz at last, and consented to go out to do the errands for the day, taking pains with her toilet, though her calls were to be limited to the grocer, the butcher and the German delicatessen shop, to fill out Margery's neat list of necessities.

"Wonder where Penny is!" Polly called to the older girls after Laura had been gone ten minutes, and the silence of the Patty-Pans had been broken only by the lively broom and duster.

"Laura didn't take her," Margery called back. "I saw her start alone. She's in there, isn't she?"

"Not one bit," cried Polly, as if her little sister were made up of fragments.

"Why, how queer!" Happie said, emerging from Bob's room with dangling duster. "She couldn't have gone out."

"No; here's her hat," Polly began, but a little crow of a laugh interrupted her.

Looking up, Happie and Polly saw Penny's dusty head appearing over the edge of the wardrobe in her mother's room, Jeunesse Dorée beside it.

The step-ladder leaned against the wardrobe, explaining the ascent.

"Oh, Penny, what made you go up there in all that dust? We couldn't sweep it off to-day and I know it's dusty up there," said Margery. "Come down, dear."

"Dorée ranned up," said Penny, whose verbs were subject to eccentricities in their past tense. "I wanted to be up too, so I climbed. But I can't come down, not ever. You'll have to come up after me."

"I don't believe she can," sighed Happie. The space between the top of the wardrobe and the ceiling was so small that the child could not sit up, and it would have been impossible for her to slide down to the top step of the ladder without falling.

"I'll go up, Margery; let me go," said Happie, and mounted the step-ladder.

There was a loud report, the support broke on one side of the ladder, and down came poor Happie, "ladder and all," like Rock-a-bye Baby.

"Oh, Hapsie, dearest, are you hurt?" cried Margery, flying to her rescue.

"Well, I am—surprised," replied Happie, slowly rising. "I don't think I'm hurt beyond a few scratches, and my feelings."

"Now, how'll we get the baby down?" asked practical Polly, satisfied that Happie was not harmed seriously, and at once turning to something that needed doing.

"We'll have to borrow a step-ladder from the Gordons," said Margery. "I'll go, though I am not fit to be seen! Do I look a perfect pig?"

"You couldn't look like a pig, Peggy; you were made so you'd look clean if you were covered with muddy stove blacking," said Happie. And Margery departed on her errand.

She came back with both Ralph and "Snigs" Gordon, and their step-ladder. Snigs chuckled at the sight of Penny's smutty little face on which the tears which she had shed at Happie's downfall had made an effective paste. Ralph placed his step-ladder and climbed up to rescue the damsel in distress and the yellow kitten.

Just then the bell rang, a sharp, decided peal and Polly ran to press the button in the kitchen which unfastened the outer door to admit visitors.

"Now, who could that be?" cried Margery, dismayed.

"It could be a postman, a peddler, a life insurance agent, a bill, a friend, a foe, the landlord, company, country cousins—shall I go on?" said Snigs.

"Never mind," said Happie. "We never have company in daytime, because all the girls we know are in school, and mother's friends understand that they can't find her here except at night. Mercy, there are all the things from Bob's room in the hall! Nobody can get in."

"Margery and we came in—and the step-ladder. You shouldn't expect, nor admit, any bigger company in this little flat, Happie. Here is Penny; please take her—eke the kitten. I'll stay up here aloft till you find out what's coming up-stairs, and whether there's room for me and your guest both." And Ralph handed down Penny to Margery, and seated himself on the top step of the ladder, folding his arms with a perfectly idiotic expression on his face.

The girls could not help laughing, and then the bell at their upper door rang smartly, and Margery squeezed through the narrow passage to answer the summons.

"'HOW DO YOU DO, MARGERY?'"

"How do you do, Margery?" said a voice, strong, insistent, crisp, but decidedly well-bred. "I have come to spend the night. There is room; there's a couch in the dining-room."

"My goodness me! It's Keren-happuch, the first," whispered Happie in comical dismay. "She's as nice as she can be, but I don't know how to take her—I believe I'm afraid of her. She pays lots of attention to me, too, because I'm her namesake."

"Had I better come down?" Ralph whispered back. "Or shall Snigs come up?"

Before Happie could answer this important question, Margery and her guest came down the hall; the boys and Happie heard Miss Bradbury set a chair on another to make more space for their passage.

"Happie, I have come to make a short visit," announced that vigorous lady entering the little bedroom. "What in the world are you doing with two boys here when you're sweeping? And why do you keep one on a step-ladder?"

"We don't, Aunt Keren," said Happie presenting her flushed cheek for Miss Bradbury's kiss, which was more hearty than the girl realized. "Penny had climbed on top of the wardrobe, and our step-ladder broke when I tried to get her down. So Ralph brought his over and rescued her. This is Charles Gordon, Miss Bradbury, and that up there is Ralph, his brother; they are the boys in the next flat."

"Yes. I hope then that they are more quiet than most boys," remarked Miss Bradbury. "I shall put my bonnet here, and my coat over the back of that chair. It is not so cold. I wore my medium weight coat; there are signs of spring—time for it, middle of March!" She spoke in crisp, curt sentences as if not to waste a word. The boys looked at her, and wondered that Happie had said she half feared her. They saw a tall woman, perhaps two or three years past sixty. Her eyes were keen, but humorous, her ample mouth was decidedly firm, but not unamiable. Her nose was the nose of an aristocrat, and her garments, though remote from so much as an approach to fashion, were of the best materials, worn with a carelessness that betokened them interesting only for their usefulness to the wearer. Eccentric Miss Bradbury was stern, perhaps, but kind, and rather a fine lady in her queer way.

"Do you know why I came?" asked the visitor turning from the bed where she had laid her bonnet, and giving two rapid strokes to her hair without a glance at the mirror.

"Because you wanted to see us, we hope?" suggested Margery with her gentle smile.

"Obviously. Never make smooth, meaningless speeches, Margaret," said Miss Bradbury. "I came, however, rather more because I felt that you wanted to see me. When I feel a drawing to certain people, as if I were being called to them across the space dividing us, I know those people need me. It has happened to me at various times in my life, and never has led me wrong. Last night I felt that I was called here; here I am. That may sound to you young people like great nonsense, but Keren-happuch Bradbury is not given to nonsense, and she is convinced that she is right in this matter."

"I don't see why not, since we know that there is such a thing as wireless telegraphy," observed Ralph from his perch, whence he had been too much interested to remember to descend.

"That's a very sensible remark, my boy, though you look anything but sensible roosting on that step-ladder in that anthropological manner," said Miss Bradbury with a twinkle.

"You don't mean that we are going to need you for—well, that there is any trouble coming, Aunt Keren?" said Happie, her mind reverting to her mother's tired face.

"I am not prophesying; I am visiting, Happie," retorted Miss Bradbury. "I have no idea why I am here, but here I am, and that because I felt sure that you needed me. Better let me get luncheon, and send these boys home while you finish your work, children. If you came to rescue Penelope from the top of the wardrobe, there is no reason why you should wait for her to crawl up again, Master Ralph Gordon."

Ralph unwound himself and began to come down on this strong hint, but he was not offended; on the contrary he liked this queer person who would guard his young girl neighbors like a dragon, as he plainly saw.

As Ralph stood erect and folded his step-ladder the bell rang once more, this time with a startling peal, and, as Margery ran to the speaking-tube and to press the button in the kitchen, Laura's voice was heard screaming in the outer hall: "Oh, open the door, open the door quick!" and she rattled the knob frantically.

"What is it, what has happened?" cried Happie, catching the little girl as she half fell over the threshold when she opened the door.

"Mama, oh, poor, poor mama!" wailed Laura, clutching at Happie.

"What?" gasped Happie, turning so white that Ralph sprang to help her.

"She has been sent home in a carriage. Oh, oh, I came along just in time to see her. I ran up when the man rang the bell," moaned Laura.

Miss Bradbury came forward with a kind of collected haste. "Laura," she said sternly, "stop your hysterics. I have no patience with hysterics. As though there were anything dreadful about being sent home in a carriage! Ralph, come with me. We will go down and help Mrs. Scollard up-stairs."

Ralph Gordon brushed past the frightened Scollard girls, and followed Miss Bradbury instantly. When they returned it was very slowly, and the janitor of the house, with a stranger who had been passing, was helping them. They were carrying Mrs. Scollard, and Margery and Happie clutched each other, and Laura ran away to hide, fearing to look.

Their mother's face was ashen, and her eyes were closed. Polly began to cry, and Penny fled to Snigs for comfort; for the first time in her life her sisters were not equal to giving it.

"This way," said Miss Bradbury leading. The men laid Mrs. Scollard on her own bed, and withdrew.

Her eyes fluttered and opened. "Don't be frightened, children," she said. "I'm only tired."

"What doctor shall I fetch?" asked Ralph. "And isn't there something Snigs could get from the drug store in the meantime?"

"Yes. Go for—who, Margery?" asked Miss Bradbury.

"Doctor Revel on the corner is the nearest," said Margery, so frightened her lips would hardly form the words.

"Happie, heat milk," ordered Miss Bradbury. "Yes, go for that doctor, boy; hasten. I suppose we must not prescribe, but I think it's pure exhaustion."

"Mother put away some of that old wine which you sent her for Christmas, Aunt Keren. She said it must be kept for sickness. Isn't that best now?" asked Happie.

"Old port! The very thing! Get it. I'm glad to see you have self-control, Happie," her godmother smiled at her approvingly as she spoke. "I am going to make Laura behave herself and look after Polly and Penny. Then we will undress your mother and make her comfortable."

She stalked grimly away with a look that promised scant allowance for Laura's twelve years. Miss Bradbury was the sort of woman that expected every child, as well as "every man to do his duty," thus outstripping England as interpreted by Nelson.

By some means she succeeded in dominating Laura, and the two younger children's voices hushed, as Laura took them in hand.

Then this efficient woman who had come so opportunely to the frightened tenants of the Patty-Pans, returned to get Mrs. Scollard comfortably in bed, where she lay with closed eyes when Ralph returned with the doctor.

"You've been a good and useful boy; I thoroughly approve of you," said Miss Bradbury, and somehow Ralph felt as if he had been brevetted. Miss Keren-happuch was such a strong character that her commendation carried with it the conviction of a genuine gain.

The Gordon boys slipped away to their own apartment across the hall. Margery and Happie waited anxiously, holding each other fast, while the doctor examined his patient.

"No disease; pure exhaustion, but that is quite enough," he said, coming out through the sliding door to the waiting girls. "She has been spurring herself on for months; the worn nerves can go no further. She must have complete rest and good nursing for a year, perhaps; certainly for a long time. Then I can promise that she will be perfectly restored. It is nothing serious, nothing to be alarmed about, I assure you."

The doctor bowed himself out, and Miss Bradbury attended him to the door.

Margery and Happie stood silently watching him go, each occupied with the same thought. Nothing serious? When the promise that their mother should be restored if she took the needed rest held the implication that she would never be well without it! And when there was no money but what she had earned, earned at the price of this breakdown! Nothing serious! Why, nothing could be more serious, as this beloved mother's young daughters realized with the hand of this, their first acquaintance with real sorrow, heavily gripping their hearts.

[CHAPTER IV]
AN ANGEL IN DISGUISE

"It's rather worse to be ill with nothing the matter than to be sensibly ill of a disease," said poor Mrs. Scollard speaking feebly, but with an attempt at her own cheerfulness.

She had been ill for three weeks, and had not improved perceptibly over her condition in the beginning. "Only a nervous collapse," the doctor repeated. It had been so long coming on that the recovery must be proportionately long. And how could she get better with the thought that when her strength had given out, the family income had ceased sitting like a vulture at her bedside? Small as was the rent of the "Patty-Pans," still it must be paid. A month was as long as she could be idle, yet that month was nearly past, and she was no better.

Margery, Bob and Happie for the first time realized what a vitally real thing money is, and vainly strove to find a way to take their mother's place as the bread-winners. They understood only too clearly that there was no chance for that dear mother to get well while she lay in the second Patty-Pan room with anxiety tearing at her heart-strings.

Ralph and Snigs and their fine mother were comforts in those black days, but it was on Miss Bradbury that the Scollards found themselves relying with hourly increasing appreciation of her strength. That remarkable woman had not suggested returning to her home, but nightly occupied the parlor couch in the Patty-Pans, and daily took charge of its sorrowful tenants. Delicacies such as Margery would not have dared to buy found their way to Mrs. Scollard, and Margery discovered when she went to market that there were no out-standing accounts such as she had been dreading with the neighboring tradesmen; Miss Keren-happuch paid as she went out of her own purse, which the Scollard girls had always believed to be not over-abounding.

"Over-doing in work is not likely to lead to under-doing a breakdown," Miss Bradbury replied to Mrs. Scollard's remark. "Nature is an excellent accountant, and knows how to collect her dues. I think I should be satisfied with what ails you, if I were you, Charlotte."

She altered the position of Mrs. Scollard's pillows and smoothed them with a touch singularly gentle in such an energetic person, and beckoned Margery to follow her into the dining-room. Laura sat here in an attitude of despair, her feet stuck straight out before her indifferently to the size of the room, her arms hanging over the back of her chair. Bob and Happie were trying to occupy themselves with the lessons which their mother would have required had she been well, and serene little Polly sat rocking her doll, she the more sleepy of the two, though the doll's eyes did droop with the motion of the rocking-chair.

Miss Bradbury took the chair which Polly had occupied when the little girl yielded it up on her entrance, and gathered Polly into her lap, who in turn still held Phyllis Lovelocks tight.

"Now, my dears," began Miss Keren-happuch in her businesslike way that covered so much tenderness, "you all look dreadfully worried. You must not; your mother will get well after she gets to the country."

"Why, Aunt Keren!" exclaimed Happie reproachfully. "When you know she can't even afford to stay in the city!"

"Which is the reason that she is going to my farm, that, and the fact that she must have fresh air and quiet," said Miss Keren-happuch.

"Your farm!" exclaimed all the children together.

"Yes; in Pennsylvania," said Miss Bradbury calmly. "I have never seen it, and I doubt strongly that I shall be particularly pleased with the sight. But a farm it is, of some seventy acres, up in the mountains, and there is where we are going in two weeks."

"We don't understand," cried Bob, after he had exchanged excited and bewildered glances with the others.

"There is nothing more to understand," declared Miss Bradbury. "Polly, your doll's arm will break off if you don't turn it around. Your mother must rest, there is no money to provide that rest, I must go to the country somewhere, so instead of boarding this summer, I am going to open that house of mine, which I have never seen, and you children are going to keep house for your mother and me indefinitely. It's not in the least difficult nor mysterious."

"You trump!" cried Bob with an enthusiasm that prevented any suspicion of disrespect.

"I heard a boy say lately that he would not live in the country for anything," observed Miss Bradbury with her twinkle.

"But to save his mother, and when he didn't know how he could live anywhere!" cried Bob.

"You dear, dear, blessed Aunt Keren!" cried Happie, throwing herself upon her adopted relative with an abandon which, under ordinary circumstances that lady would have disapproved.

"There, there! I suppose it is a relief," she said patting Happie's back. "But I warn you that it will not be at all attractive, probably. I took it for a debt, and my debtor said afterwards, so I am told, that it was cheaper to give it to me than to keep it. I suspect that he pretended not to be able to pay me in money in order to get rid of this farm. So you may be prepared for going into the wilderness. However, it will be a wilderness of pure air and great altitude, and we can exist somehow. It will undoubtedly build up poor Charlotte."

"I am going to like it," Happie declared. "I learned to like tomatoes, and I thought that in all this world I could never taste them a second time. And I love olives now, but when I first tried one, I really had to rush away from the table. So I am going to love that farm no matter what it is. How could we help loving a place that cured motherkins?"

"Aunt Keren, you are an angel in disguise," announced Laura solemnly.

"I must admit the disguise," retorted Miss Bradbury. "Now, children, I want you to get ready to go out of town in two weeks from now. Can you do it?"

"Yes, but we have a lease of the Patty-Pans; we shall have to sub-let it," said Margery, with the tiny anxious line appearing in her forehead.

"Furnished," supplemented Miss Bradbury. "I shall send up all the furniture necessary. There is some furniture there; I don't know how much, nor how good."

"Nobody has told you what we think of your giving up your comfortable summer in the White Mountains and down in Maine, without a care, and going up to this farm in order to cure dear mother, and to help us," said Margery, with a quiver in her voice.

"Nonsense!" cried Miss Keren-happuch briskly. "Every landed proprietor should look after his estate. It is high time that I saw mine. I shall enjoy the novelty of the situation. For the rest, Margaret, I have a very real affection for your mother, and a profound respect for the way that she has fought her good fight for you orphaned children. There is more than you know in my feeling for Charlotte; your grandmother and I were not ordinary friends. I should not do less than my best for her daughter, even if I were not as fond of her as I am. So there is nothing more to be said on that head."

"We will call the farm 'the Ark,'" said Happie. "It will be our refuge in this flood of affliction."

"It's not a particularly original name, Hapsie," remarked Bob. "I think lots of houses have been called the Ark, but it fits this case to a T. I don't suppose there's any doubt that we should not have had a place in which to lay our heads if it had not been for Aunt Keren and her farm."

A knocking at the dumb waiter door warned the Scollards that Ralph and Snigs wanted to be admitted; they had adopted this substitute for the bell not to disturb Mrs. Scollard. Polly slipped down from Miss Bradbury's lap and ran to open the door to them.

"Boys, what do you think?" cried Happie the moment they entered. "We are going away!"

The Gordons had known all the troubles, the anxieties that threatened to engulf their neighbors, and had shared their despondency over a prospect that held no hope. They stopped short, looking hardly less excited than the family group.

"What do you mean?" Ralph cried.

"Going away with blessed Aunt Keren to a farm she owns in Pennsylvania," Happie said. "It will save mother's life—and you know what else it will do, Ralph. We are going to try to sub-let the Patty-Pans furnished, so it won't be good-bye forever to you."

"And my mother wants to find another flat!" cried Snigs, getting very red in the effort to speak fast enough. "There are some college boys from the South want to stay in New York all summer. She wants to rent another flat and take them with her. She was saying to-night she might move if she could not get one in this house. Mayn't we have yours?"

"Now, did you ever in all your life?" demanded Happie of the world at large. And the world at large, in the person of Margery, Bob and Laura, replied that it never did! Even Miss Bradbury seemed elated over this remarkable coincidence of need and supply on both sides.

"Come on over and tell mother about it!" said Snigs, seizing Bob's arm, and gesticulating wildly to Margery and Happie, while plunging towards the door as if he feared the escape of the Patty-Pans or of his mother, unless they were at once permanently secured to each other.

"Go, if you like," Miss Bradbury supplemented. "I think I will unfold my plan to your mother this moment. The rule is not to talk to a nervous invalid at night, but I suspect that she is more sleepless now from worry than she will be from excitement over a prospect which, though not brilliant, at least holds a solution of her troubles."

The oldest Scollards having departed with and to their neighbors, Miss Keren-happuch went into their mother's room, and seated herself on the edge of the bed with an air of such resolution that the sick woman humorously wondered whether she had come to amputate or to execute.

"You are to be deported, Charlotte," she announced decidedly.

"Deported? Why and whence?" asked Mrs. Scollard.

"For precisely the same reason that the authorities always deport—because you are not fit to stay," replied Miss Bradbury. "We are going to spend the summer on my Pennsylvania farm, your family and myself."

"I didn't know you had a farm," gasped Mrs. Scollard, catching at the first thing that occurred to her to say, overwhelmed with the magnitude of the announcement.

"Neither did I, fully, until to-day," said Miss Bradbury. "I have never seen it, but I believe it will shelter us. As soon as you are able to move we are going, and our return is most indefinite. You are going to sub-let the Patty-Pans, furnished, and the girls are to keep house for us while we enjoy ourselves without a care upon our minds."

"Dear, dear Miss Keren!" sobbed Mrs. Scollard with the ready tears of nervous prostration. "How good you are! But do you think I could let you take my place, and support all my family for several months?"

"Nonsense, Charlotte! I shall save money. My summers cost me not less than three hundred dollars always, junketing around from hotel to hotel, from the seashore to the mountains. We won't spend three hundred dollars up there, not all of us put together, if I know anything about an isolated farm. And I really ought to look after my property. What do I get out of the sort of summers I usually spend? Weariness and vexation of spirit! Dress three times a day, not a solitary spot that isn't humming with summer voices! When I want to sit down and hear the waves, or to read, I have to hear a lot of empty-headed women telling one another about their servants' misdeeds, or how the tailor spoiled a coat, or—worst of all—how seriously they doubt the wisdom of speaking to some of the other women, one of whom is too quiet to be a desirable acquaintance, and the other too gay to know! And all the long golden summer days they sit on the piazza and make hideous, useless things out of pretty materials! It is nothing to regret that I may spend one summer on my own probably worthless estate, in dignified seclusion. Whether or not, we are going. I did not come to consult you, but to announce it. So go to sleep. For half a year you are to have a vacation where, at the worst, you will be two thousand feet above tide water, and must get strong, knowing the children are safe, and you are secure, breathing good air, even if there is little else to live on. Go to sleep, Charlotte, and stop worrying, because I want you to get strong enough to go at once. Since I have remembered my farm, I am all youthful impatience to see it."

Good Miss Keren-happuch arose with a jerk, intending to stalk out of the room, but Mrs. Scollard sprang up and caught her around the neck. "You dear, you dear! I can't thank you!" she sobbed.

"I don't remember suggesting that you should," said Miss Keren gruffly. But the kiss with which she laid her old friend's daughter back upon the pillow was very tender.

Mrs. Gordon was delighted with the opportunity to take the Patty-Pans and its furniture; it fitted her plans to obtain it quite as well as it worked for the Scollards to have her assume it. Before any one had time to realize what had happened, energetic Miss Bradbury had set Margery and Happie at their preparations for departure, and going away had become a definite fact.

It seemed a little formidable to the three eldest children, now that the plan had taken on definiteness. Mrs. Scollard was about again, proving that if one can find the way to minister to a mind diseased, strength attends on such ministration, but she was still so weak and pale that Margery could hardly look at her without tears. She tried hard to be brave, but she dreaded leaving behind her the only life that she had known, to go away into an untried life among new surroundings.

More than any of the other children, Happie had a cat-like love of place, and to her it was very hard to go away from New York with uncertainty in her mind as to how or when she could return to it.

"I suppose I shall go around wailing and gnashing my teeth, Bob," she confided to her brother. But Bob knew her, and her ability to make the best of something that was not merely a bad bargain, but no bargain at all.

"Not you, Hapsie!" he said. "You will find a dozen good reasons for preferring that farm to any other spot on earth, no matter if it turns out as bad as Martin Chuzzlewit's Eden."

"That's not a bad testimony to the fitness of your nickname, Happie," smiled Margery.

Laura openly gave way to grief, which she carefully fostered in herself, for Laura loved the rôle of martyr as well as Happie loved to be sunny.

It troubled Mrs. Scollard sorely to see Laura's sorrow until she took to singing Schubert's "Adieu," as a suitable expression of her woe, then her mother smiled at the sentimental little girl, justly concluding that sentimental grief was not dangerously deep.

Jeunesse Dorée was to accompany his family as a matter of course, though the old colored woman who came to clean for them held up her hands in horror at the suggestion.

"You sholy won't have luck if you takes him," she groaned. "'Twan't never reckoned right where I come fum to move a cat, and I just begs an' prays you let him run. It's bad nuff ter see you goin', let 'lone wif a cat."

"We think it would be very bad luck to be deprived of Dorée," smiled Mrs. Scollard. "And surely, Amanda, some sort of punishment ought to fall on those who would turn a petted creature into the street to starvation and ill-treatment! I think I'd rather risk the effect of taking him."

"Bob has bought a beautiful strong basket for him," said Happie applauding her mother's sentiments with a bright smile as she went through the Patty-Pans parlor.

She found Laura with Polly in the chamber which they shared, Polly watching her elder with a face expressive of puzzled awe, tempered by amusement. Penny was lost in the labor of packing the animals into a large Noah's ark, and losing her patience with the bulk of elephants and flies—which really did not differ materially—and with unruly legs and horns which got continually entangled.

"Bob says," the mite was remarking, "we's all going to live in a nark, an' for me to get you nanimals all back 'gain 'fore ve flood. If you don't swallow you' horns, you foolsish mooly cow, you, I'll make you sail on ve roof, and vhen you'll see!"

"Leave the ducks and geese out to swim, Penny mine, and you'll have more room," suggested Happie. "Let Happie coax the cow to draw in her horns. There, you see what good it does to pat her and to speak to her gently? She's in. What are you doing, Laura?"

Laura looked up, raised her eyebrows, and sighed with her grown-up air, but she did not answer.

"She says she's going to put all her pretty things in a box and mark it for me when I'm twelve, going on thirteen," said Polly answering for her. "She says she's sure she'll never live to use 'em. Now, isn't that silly? Because farms are healthy, I thought!"

Happie laughed. "Oh, Laura," she cried, "how can you be such a goose? I wouldn't count on getting those treasures if I were you, Polly. I think Laura may live to use them."

Laura regarded Happie with serene superiority. "Grief often kills," she said with the brevity of a tragic poet. "I'm sure I shall pine away. Do you know what nostalgia means?"

Again Happie laughed out merrily. "No; do you?" she said.

"It means homesickness," replied Laura with crushing dignity. "I found the word in a book of poetry and I looked it up, because I knew it must mean something lovely and sad. I made a song without words about it; it goes this way." And Laura hummed a line of music that was more minor than any known key seemed able to represent.

"Isn't that perfectly be-au-ti-ful?" she demanded. "Doesn't that sound just like nostalgia? That may be my last composition; it will be if this move kills me, as I 'most know it will. Wouldn't you feel sure that meant some one dying of homesickness if you heard it, and no one told you?"

"What a queer thing you are, Laura!" exclaimed Happie, half impressed, though she could never keep a respectfully straight face over Laura's performances. "I can't tell whether it sounds like nos—what-you-call-it or not, because I never heard the word before, so I haven't had time to know it set to music, but I don't think I should know that tune meant homesickness. It sounds to me like the wail of the washerwoman who got too much blueing in the clothes—it's the bluest thing I ever heard."

"You haven't one bit of—of anything in you, Happie," said Laura turning away pettishly.

Bob came in, his arms full of half-discarded boyish treasures. "Say, what do you think, Hap; will there be room for this stuff?" he demanded. "I could give it up, but I'd just as lief keep it. You see it won't be our house."

"Still there must be room for everything, since it's a farm, and we have a freight car to ourselves. I'd keep it," said Happie with the understanding she could not give Laura.

"I guess I asked you instead of Margery because I wanted that advice, and I knew you'd give it—she thinks I clutter," said Bob. "Are you going to take all your own Lares and Penates?"

"What it is to have a classical education!" exclaimed Happie in mock admiration. "No; we are only going to take our Laura and Penelope." And she swooped down to snatch a refreshing kiss from the pink and white baby, and to rescue a particularly spotted dog from having his exceedingly curled-up tail shut in the cover of the Noah's ark.

At last all the preparations were completed, the Patty-Pans flat was shining and fleckless, everything in apple-pie order to be relinquished to Mrs. Gordon's care. Ralph and Snigs were inconsolable over the approaching parting until Miss Bradbury hinted her intention of asking them to follow the exiles sometime during the summer, when they plucked up heart and began to plan for meeting on the farm.

It was a cold, raw day in April, a day left over from March getting used up in April, a most dreary and uncomfortable day on which to set forth upon a journey with an invalid to migrate from the city to the country, and to a house the comfort of which there was good reason to doubt.

The Gordon boys went to the station and pressed upon their friends, in parting, bulky packages of almost any possibilities. They shook hands with emotion, and the Scollard party sank into its seats silently with a suspicious redness about other lashes than Laura's, though everybody made heroic efforts to appear cheerful, and not ungrateful for Miss Bradbury's kindness. The only way to succeed in this effort was to keep constantly in view the good that was to be done the dear mother.

The warmth of the train was welcome. Poor Mrs. Scollard sank into the corner of her chair hardly able to endure the neuralgia which had added itself to her weakness, glad of the friendly steam pipes.

The train pulled slowly out of the station, and steamed, with increasing speed across the plains of Jersey towards the distant hills.

No one spoke for some time. Then Happie aroused herself. "I wonder if the farm has good cherry-trees," she said.

Bob laughed. "Already, Happie?" he said. "I thought it would take longer than this for even your barometer to indicate clearing."

Happie smiled a feeble smile. "I'm afraid I don't much care whether it has or not," she said. "I just happened to think of it."

"Don't apologize," returned Bob. "It's a comfort to have you beginning to sit up and take notice."

Jeunesse Dorée purred when one of the children peeped into his basket, according to his cheerful habit of responding with a song to any notice.

After a time the landscape arose from the dull level of its beginnings and began to put on beauty. The hills were showing their heads in the distance, with blue vaporous lights playing over them in the pale sunshine of the chill afternoon.

On they steamed, the grade perceptibly higher, until all the young folk were looking out of the windows, enjoying the barren beauty of the mountains in the early spring. Mrs. Scollard felt the benediction of space and quiet, her throbbing nerves grew more still as her eyes sought the horizon with the delight this beauty-loving woman always found in nature.

Miss Bradbury sat preternaturally stiff and straight looking at the scene, which was as new to her as to any of the others, with the approval of a proprietor.

"It's pretty here!" cried Polly, as the train rounded a curve. As she spoke the travelers felt its motion retard. It stopped, and the guard called out: "Crestville!" They had arrived.

[CHAPTER V]
TAKING POSSESSION

Crestville had no public carriages, or "if it had," Happie said, "it kept them very private." Miss Bradbury, and what Bob called "her personally conducted party," walked around the platform of the little red station, discovering nothing but an open wagon to which were attached two sorry-looking horses with drooping heads and tails, a wagon which could not possibly be construed as intended to carry passengers.

A road ran past the station, crossing the track and continuing its muddy way up the hill, losing itself under the bare trees. The mud was disheartening, the silence oppressive. Mrs. Scollard, weak and tired, caught her breath in an arrested sob, feeling that with the dying echoes of the train had died away also the last echoes of civilization.

"Is there any one here who will take us to the Bittenbender farm?" Miss Bradbury asked the station-master.

"That's owned by a city woman now," remarked that worthy reflectively.

"Yes, I own it. How shall I get there?" said Miss Bradbury.

"I heard she'd got some one here to open it up for her," said the station-master.

"Yes; I wrote Mrs. Shafer to see that the place was aired and cleaned; we've come up for the summer. Can you tell me how to get my friends over there?" insisted Miss Bradbury, divided in mind between annoyance and amusement.

"The widow Shafer's got rheumatism too bad to clean anything, her own house even, leave alone yours," said the station-master. "She couldn't open up."

"What did she do then? Why didn't she write me that she couldn't attend to it?" demanded Miss Bradbury, aghast at the prospect of taking her flock into a damp, chilly, uncleaned house.

"Left it go," replied the station-master to her first question. "I guess she was talking of writing, but her hands hain't much good—they're stiff."

"Well, you haven't told me who I can get to take us over," Miss Bradbury reminded him, abandoning the subject of the widow.

"There hain't nobody," replied the station-master succinctly.

The owner of the wagon and the discouraged horses had come forth from the freight end of the station at the beginning of this conversation to which he had attended with rapt attention, his jaws slowly moving up and down as he leaned forward, elbows on knees on the cart seat which he had ascended.

"You couldn't come back after her, Jake?" suggested the station-master turning to him.

The man shook his head. "Goin' after a load," he said, not specifying of what. "Mebbe I could send Pete Kuntz back after her; his hosses hain't haulin'."

"Pete couldn't take 'em all—two, four, eight of 'em," said the station-master reflectively. "He couldn't come back after another load, neither; 'twould make it too late. That's a bad road up along past Eli's, before you come to the Bittenbender place. If I was you, livin' up that way, I'd see if I couldn't git the road overseer to work that road. I declare I'd ruther come down with my team and work it myself, if I wuz you, even if 'twan't part of my reg'lar road tax, before I'd ride it as 'tis."

"That overseer hain't worth nothin'," declared the driver. "I wisht George Lieder had got it—I'd er voted fer him, I would, if they'd er put him up."

"Don't you think there's any way that this Pete you spoke of could get us over?" interrupted Miss Bradbury. "And wouldn't it be better to decide on something soon? It grows dark early, and my friend is ill."

"Well, I guess!" said the man on the wagon. "There'd be nine of you with Pete. Say, I never thought! Pete might go up an' git my three seated hack wagon, an' take 'em all to oncet, usin' his team. Say, wouldn't that fix it, Jimmy?"

"I guess," assented the station-master.

"And what about the trunks?" suggested Miss Bradbury, indicating the generous pile that adorned the platform. "We must have some of them to-night."

"Well, if you was to make it worth my while I'd do my haulin' to-morrer, an' take them there trunks up fer you," said the driver.

"What do you ask?" inquired Miss Bradbury, inwardly resolved to meet any demand.

"Guess I'd have to charge you a dollar and a-half," said the man, eyeing Miss Bradbury dubiously out of the shadow of his very long nose.

Miss Bradbury gave a soft chuckle, though her face remained grave. She glanced at the six trunks which had come with them and said: "That's a bargain."

"Couldn't Bob and I ride over with him, Aunt Keren?" asked Happie.

"I'm afraid it would prove a springless and tiresome drive, Happie," said Miss Keren. "But I've no other objection, if your friend here has none—Mr.—Mr.——"

"Shale, Jake Shale," supplemented the man. "I don't mind; I kinder like comp'ny."

He loaded the trunks on his wagon, and Happie clambered up beside him, while Bob adorned the top of the smallest trunk.

"I hope you will send this Pete after us soon," said Miss Bradbury as she saw Mrs. Scollard press her fingers into her throbbing temples.

"Yes, ma'am; oh, my, yes, ma'am," responded Jake, gathering up the reins. "He'll be along quick. I'll hustle an' so'll he. Say, Jimmy, if you want any more of that there cider o' mine I've got a couple o' barrels you kin have's well's not. I'd like you to git it in your own kaigs, though."

"Well, if you could wait a little, I'd go up-stairs an' ask Hannah what she thought," said Jimmy. "Mebbe you'd better git along now, though," he added, seeing Miss Bradbury's objection to further delay getting ready to explode. "I'll let you know to-morrer night. It's lodge night, anyhow, an' you'll be comin' down, won't you?"

"I guess," said Jake, and actually drove away.

To Happie's and Bob's surprise, in spite of his declaration of a mild liking for companionship, Jake did not show any desire to enter into conversation during the long up-hill drive of three miles. They stopped on their way to start "Pete Kuntz" back after the rest of the exiles, and to the children's relief, he seemed several degrees less slow and indifferent than their driver, or than Jimmy at the station. There really seemed ground for hoping, as they watched him get out his horses and jump on one to go after Jake's "hack wagon," that their tired relatives left behind might get to their new home before nightfall.

The road ran through woods, light growth chiefly, the second yield after forest fires. Sometimes these scrub oaks, birch, maples and the rest, fell away, allowing glimpses of views that made these two exiles cry out with pleasure, and gave them a fleeting hope that there might be balm in their Gilead. But the mud was thick, the wagon wheels sank low, and the tired horses toiled till Happie and Bob, true animal lovers, ached sympathetically.

It was a lonely road; they passed but one farm, and Happie's heart grew heavier and heavier with forebodings that this new home was going to tax severely her ability to live up to her nickname. The desolation, the sense of being cut off from everything on the face of the earth except mud and trees, the remembrance of her mother's weakness, was bringing on a despair that the splendid views of distant hills and valleys, caught through the openings in the trees, soon lost their power to alleviate.

"Are there many tramps around here?" asked Bob suddenly, and Happie knew that he shared her thoughts and feelings.

"Never none," said Jake promptly. "Too far from the railroad track."

"Isn't that comfortable, Hapsie?" said Bob looking with pity at his courageous sister's pale face. "And did you ever see finer views? And don't forget how tired and hungry you are, Happie! Remember things look very different on a full stomach, and when you're rested."

Happie nodded hard, not trusting herself to speak, and Bob gave up trying to point out the brighter side, invisible to himself, and contented himself with patting her hand.

At last they began to climb a hill that was far higher and steeper than any they had yet scaled, but on which, fortunately, the mud had completely dried. The ascent was beautifully wooded, with real forest growths, and bright wintergreen berries gleamed at the foot of the trees.

As they neared the top, the woods fell away, and at the summit they came out upon an open plain. On every side stretched a view that was more sublime than any upon which Bob and Happie's young eyes had ever rested. Happie forgot her weariness, hunger and despair as she straightened herself to drink it in, and Bob gave vent to a long whistle, exclaiming: "My soles and uppers!"

A little distance down the road they saw a dilapidated rail fence and what had once been a gate. Jake pointed to it with his boney hand. "That's Bittenbender's," he said. "That's your grandmother's place."

"The Ark, Hapsie, after such a long deluge!" exclaimed Bob. "But that's not our grandmother, Mr. Shale; that's Miss Bradbury, whom nobody will ever be lucky enough to have for a grandmother."

Happie had bubbled over into her infective laugh at the suggestion of Miss Keren-happuch as a grandmother, and both young people strained their eyes for the first glimpse of the house.

They got it in a moment, disclosing a brown house, sadly in need of paint, two stories high and decidedly over-shadowed by a big, ramshackle barn, gray from weather, with its front door swinging on one hinge. This melancholy building was flanked by a chicken house and granary in worse repair than itself.

"It has every foot of this glorious view!" cried Happie, seeing the disgust on Bob's face, and sincerely able herself to rejoice in the thought.

"Well, it needs it!" said Bob, and Happie could not deny that he spoke truly.

Jake turned in at the gate; Bob ironically pointed out to Happie the advantages of a gate that did not require opening.

Jake paused at the steps of the house. "I guess I'll let the trunks here," he said. "We couldn't take 'em into the house till they come with the keys anyhow."

Bob and Happie assented, and the trunks were deposited at the foot of the steps, all three of which needed mending. But after Jake had driven away, they found that the assumption that keys were needed to enter this house was a mistake—the door was not fastened; it opened on slight pressure, and Bob and Happie entered.

The unattractive odors of an old house long closed saluted them as they came in, and they caught a glimpse of a scantily furnished sitting-room and dining-room. The stairs ran up straight before them, beginning just beyond the casements of the two doors; they were not carpeted, but had once been painted a depressing drab, of which proof remained on the sides around the bannisters, though the middle of each step was worn quite bare.

Happie shrank with an irrepressible shudder; the whole aspect was so barren, so repulsive to her homesick soul.

"Let's wait for the others to see it for the first time with us," she said. "Let's sit outside on the steps till they come."

Bob smiled and drew her hand protectingly through his arm.

"You can wait to see more, you are not impatient for your new home, are you, Happie? And you like the view outside better than inside? Well, the house doesn't 'pretty much,' as old Mr. Frost used to say, but it certainly has the greatest view in Pennsylvania."

They sat down disconsolately on the steps, in the dampness of the declining day, and waited. The stillness was dreadful. Happie began to laugh, tearfully, and Bob turned to her with an anxiously inquiring look.

"No, I'm not getting crazy or hysterical," she replied to it. "I was thinking of that funny story of Ardelia in Arcady, and that the poor little street child was right when she said: 'Gee! N'Yawk's de place!'"

"Now, Happie!" exclaimed Bob reproachfully.

"I'm sorry, Bob," said Happie contritely. "I'll never so much as hint it again."

In less time than they had expected, Bob and Happie saw the large covered wagon, with its three wide seats "all filled with Scollards," Bob said, appearing at the top of the hill, and they ran down to the rickety gate to give their family a welcome which should in some sort make up for the inhospitality of their surroundings.

"Supper ready, Happie?" her mother called out cheerfully, seeing at a glance the effort that her girl was making to be blithe, and seconding it handsomely.

"Tsupper ready, Happie?" echoed Penelope sincerely.

"Not quite," Happie called back. "We waited to have you go through the house with us; we thought Aunt Keren had a right to the first inspection, so we couldn't get supper till you came."

"Where can we get supper?" asked Margery dismally.

"In our own kitchen," returned Miss Bradbury. "We have laid in quite enough provisions, and I shall not mind burning up the gate if there is no other fuel."

Bob marshaled the family up the three dilapidated steps, and threw open the door.

"One at a time, if you please, gentlemen, as the parrot said when the crows began pulling out his feathers," he remarked. "You have to go in and turn at once to the right or to the left, because there's no room in the hall to assemble. But it's all right, Aunt Keren; it will be jolly after we have jollied it a little," he added hastily, remembering the kindness that had brought them there, and fearing Miss Bradbury might think him unappreciative.

"We are explorers together, Bob; I am but your pilot, so don't dread my being hurt by your 'jollying,'" said Miss Bradbury. "I don't feel responsible for this house. I am going up to lay off my bonnet; I don't like to inaugurate our summer by putting my bonnet down on the dining-room table." And Miss Bradbury rigidly stalked up the steep stairs to begin her life in the country according to her ideas of propriety.

Margery and Laura went into the living-room, while Mrs. Scollard with her two least girls turned towards the dining-room.

Laura dropped on a chair, which promptly gave way under her, and she fell on the floor in a heap that effectually prevented the remarks she was about to make.

"Go light on our furniture, Laura," said Bob gravely. "It is marked: Fragile."

"How was I to know that horrid chair's third leg was just stuck in?" demanded Laura, with tears in her eyes; she hated of all things to be made ridiculous.

"How indeed?" echoed Bob. "How were you to know which was its third leg? I'm sure I couldn't tell."

"It's worse than I expected, Happie," said Laura indignantly, as if her sister were responsible for the fact.

"I didn't expect such a magnificent view," said Happie staunchly. "Now, if you're the poet you want to be you'll think of nothing but that one thing."

"Aunt Keren said it would be slenderly furnished," said Margery, "but I did not think any furnishing could be as slender as this is."

"This isn't slender furnishing—it's generous unfurnishing, Margery," said Happie. "Besides, what does it matter; Aunt Keren has sent up a whole carload of things! Let's go see mother and the kitchen."

Mrs. Scollard turned to meet them with a smile that was heroic, considering her shocked state of mind, and her neuralgia, and Miss Bradbury came down stairs with an expression of resolution on her face that would have befitted Jael, a likeness further carried out by Miss Keren-happuch's first remark.

"I must find some nails before I sleep and fasten something over the window in the room where I took off my bonnet; the glass is out," she remarked. "Lassies, you and I are to get supper. There are few chairs, and they are like Jenny Wren, their 'backs are bad and their legs are queer.' Fortunately there can't be less than one of a table, or we should have nothing to eat off of, and we have one table—genuine old pine! Bob, suppose you try getting water, and then forage for wood; the pump looks able-bodied, if you are."

Bob was successful in his interview with the pump, and returned victorious from his forage for wood.

The stove was rusty, and "its draught was draughty," Happie remarked, as she vainly coaxed it to give the wood the warm welcome they felt it deserved.

At last a fire was dully burning, and the water in a saucepan, appropriated in lieu of the leaking teakettle, had begun to bubble around the edges, so that there was a cheering prospect of tea. Happie vigorously beat eggs to be scrambled in the frying-pan which Miss Bradbury was scouring, and Margery cut the bread which they had brought with them, while Laura mournfully set the table with such odds and ends of crockery, politely called china, which the place afforded.

When it was ready, it really was not a very bad supper, served with the best of sauces, to all but Mrs. Scollard, who was far too worn-out to do more than nibble a crust of bread with her tea.

No one had remembered kerosene oil, so the three glass lamps discovered in the cellar were "hors de combat," Laura said, priding herself on her French surviving her despair.

There was no choice but to go to bed early for lack of light by which to sit up. Everybody's spirits were several notches higher for the comfort of food, and Penny grew quite hilarious playing trolley on a couch that had such bad springs that Bob remarked "there was no danger of a live wire on that trolley."

Jeunesse Dorée contributed to the improved state of mind of the exiles by his funny antics, going on a voyage of discovery over his new quarters, backing and shying and swelling up at imaginary dangers, and at the singular forms of new shadows, and at last settling down with his nose at a mouse hole from which there seemed to be good ground for his excited expectancy of a mouse.

One of the trunks which Jake had brought up from the station held bed clothing, and Margery and Happie, with Polly to fetch and carry, fell to making beds by the short April twilight.

Laura tried to arrange the bureaux, but the dainty toilette accessories, which had been so pretty on the broad dressers at home, looked sadly out of place on the yellow pine, the gray with red roses, the high black walnut, and the brown bureau with the yellow and blue stripes around the edges of the drawers, which constituted the outfit of the Ark.

There were five bedrooms furnished, after their fashion, and two more under the slanting kitchen roof which were unfurnished. The bedsteads were painted pine and were old-time corded affairs, but none matched a bureau—the state of things justified Laura's artistic despair.

But Happie began to sing as she spread the heterogeneous collection of beds with their white, fine sheets and soft blankets, and this was what she sang, improvising as she went, not poetically, but with better results on the listeners than all poetry yields:

"Now this is a lark;
For fear of the dark
We must all go to bed in a minute,
For we can't see to toil
Without any oil,
And no lamp has a drop of oil in it
But we're glad to embark
In our seedy old Ark—
If there's good to be had we will win it!"

"You're your mother's comforter, Happie, my sunshine!" cried Mrs. Scollard, leaning towards her second daughter to pat the tousled head bent as its owner stooped to tuck in a blanket.

"And your adopted aunt's reliance," added Miss Keren-happuch unexpectedly from the adjoining room. And Happie felt that life was not without promise.

Miss Bradbury tucked little Penny away with her until her mother should be well enough to take her into her room. Laura and Polly were roommates, as they had been in the Patty-Pans, and Margery and Happie slept together, as they had all their lives.

The two eldest girls whispered long after they had gone to bed, and silence had fallen upon the Ark. Happie was too excited to sleep, Margery too miserable. To the eldest girl it seemed as if the life upon which she had entered was going to prove unbearable, but to the younger there appeared on the distant horizon gleams of hope. There was a certain charm in all this discomfort, and that view was really sublime. After Margery ceased to reply to her whispered remarks, Happie still lay awake, planning, speculating, beginning to hope, yet half crying too, as she remembered the dear Patty-Pans, and the only home she had ever known, the great, noisy, ugly, splendid city. But at last her mind settled down to contemplation of those glorious mountains stretching away before her window, waiting for her to see them in the morning, guarding her while she slept. In the thought of them she found comfort, and gazing upon them in imagination, she fell asleep.

[CHAPTER VI]
MAKING THE BEST OF IT

Happie was awakened "in her chamber towards the east" by the sun streaming in upon her, and with a vague impression that the house was on fire. Never had there been such a blaze of light at that hour in New York, never at any hour such a resplendent, rosy glare. In the girls' little chamber at home it had been at best but a lighter shade of gray light, chastened by the air shaft, that summoned them to a new day.

Happie sprang up to greet the dawn and to look out at her mountains—already it gave her a thrill of pleasure to feel that they were her mountains.

She awakened her sister with her cry of delight, Surely it was going to be worth suffering much discomfort and deprivation to waken every morning to such beauty as this. And when one remembered that the beauty was to restore their mother, what did exile and more or less furniture matter?

More beautiful than when clad in verdure the trees stood outlined against the eastern sky, their perfect symmetry of line and limb thrown into relief by the sunrise glow. Mists tinged with every exquisite tint of color flowed around the mountainsides like the soft draperies of Aurora. Quietly brown at her feet lay the waiting fields, except where the rye of autumn's sowing was beginning to hint of coming green. Pines and firs stood black against the sky, while the faintest tone of red showed to a keen eye that the maple buds were forming and the fresh sap running.

The glad bird chorus of later spring was wanting, but the blithe, brave bluebird uttered his cheering note, liquid as the brooks which taught it to him, and the robin defied possible frosts with his clarion whistle, sounds the more delightful that they were the only spring anthems yet audible.

Laura and Polly fluttered into the room as they heard Happie's exclamation. Happie turned towards them with a shining face.

"Oh, girls, oh, Margery, isn't it heavenly?" she cried in an ecstasy. "Really we must be happy here no matter how we hate it!"

A remark which her sisters hailed with such a shout of laughter that it cheered their mother's waking across the hall.

"The Lord is in His holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before Him," said Margery softly. "I never before realized what that meant."

Even Laura scrambled into her clothes with considerable cheerfulness after this auspicious beginning of the beginning, and the four girls got down-stairs in good time and in good spirits.

But alas! for the weakness of human nature and the brief duration of its exalted moods! When they began to grapple with the problem of getting breakfast, and of persuading the stove to burn the wood which Bob had piled ready to hand the night before, as if he had long been a country boy used to gathering fuel, the benediction of the dawn began to lose effect.

"Maybe we'd better wait for mother and Aunt Keren to advise us," said Happie at last, sitting back on her heels with ashes on her hair and despair on her face, having vainly blown the fire through the draughts which did not draw.

"What's up?" inquired Bob entering in time to catch her suggestion. "Say, I have to wash at the pump like a farm hand! I hope that freight car will come to-day."

"We're up. So is mother—I heard her—but she isn't down," said Happie. "This fire is too much for me, Bob."

"Don't you mean it is too little for you?" suggested Bob. "I don't see how it possibly can be too much for you—there's none at all. I'll have a try at it; I learned a trick about it last night. You have to light the fire in the southeast corner of the grate—it's not cracked there."

Bob's knowledge of the geography of the cracked stove stood him in good stead, and when Miss Bradbury and Mrs. Scollard came down the fire was under way.

Miss Keren-happuch cracked her egg with a decisive blow on the edge of a saucer—her establishment did not boast an egg cup.

"That Shale stratum which brought our trunks, and Bob and Happie, last night, is going to lend himself, with the aid of Peter Kuntz, our driver, to bringing up our household goods to-day, if the car gets here, as they think it will," she said. "I never realized how appropriately one's effects might be called goods—they will indeed be goods to us in this dearth of everything. And the first thing I shall do will be to find a woman to preside over our housework, for I suspect that will be the attitude these independent farmers' wives will take towards it. Bob, perhaps you had better look after the carting, and we two Keren-happuchs, Happie my dear, will look for the woman—as the proverb advises one to do whenever there is trouble."

"Why not ask Jake Shale if he knows of one? He is coming now," suggested Mrs. Scollard. Miss Bradbury hurried out to the steps.

"What is?" the family within heard him ask. "Some one to help you out? I guess. Mebbe she might help you a little first along."

"She?" repeated Miss Bradbury.

"Her, yes," said Jake. "We hain't got so much work now to our place, but she couldn't do it long."

"Oh, your wife!" exclaimed Miss Bradbury, enlightened. "If you will bring her here, I will not look for any one else. You are sure she'll come?"

"I guess," affirmed Jake. And he drove away with Bob on the seat beside him.

The family hailed them with delight reappearing at noon, seated on familiar crates piled high on the wagon. Jake not only brought his wife when he came down in the afternoon, but his elongated son of eighteen, who opened boxes industriously, but who could not be persuaded to open his mouth.

As fast as Noah Shale pried open crates, his father and Bob carried their contents to their place, and the new stove, their own chairs, rugs, and the best beloved of the pictures, which were hurried into something like order that afternoon, gave the forlorn old Ark a very different aspect by the second night from that which it had worn on the family's arrival.

Miss Bradbury surveyed her house by lamp-light—for she had bought oil—with an amused criticism that held the germ of approval.

"Who can kalsomine?" she demanded suddenly of Mrs. Jake passing out of the room to get a few sticks of wood for the hearth which to the joy of all the exiles they found in the living-room, and with a perfect draught.

"What is?" said Mrs. Shale stopping short. "I kin, fer one, and he kin, and the boy could if he wanted, and you could—most anybody, I guess, that wants to. Why did you want to know?"

"I'm going to make these walls clean, at least, upstairs and down," said Miss Bradbury, pointing to the blackened walls and ceilings which seemed to indicate that the wood-fire on the hearth had not always crackled and snapped as it was then doing.

"Make it look whiter," remarked Mrs. Shale, resuming her way with a slightly superfluous statement.

Not only did grass have no chance to grow under Miss Bradbury's feet; it could not so much as sprout. By the next day Jake Shale, young Noah Shale and Peter Kuntz were all wielding kalsomine brushes upstairs and down in the Ark, with Bob as an understudy learning with each stroke to make the next one better.

White and sweet with lime on the morning of the fifth day of life in it, the Ark reflected the sunshine on the wall of Happie's room when she opened her eyes and aroused Margery.

They found Miss Bradbury in the living-room, bending over a trunk that had not heretofore been opened. She turned to meet the girls' bright faces with a smile on her own, and held up her finger warningly.

"It's only five o'clock," she whispered. "Don't wake your mother. This comes of having such brilliant walls to make our eastward-looking chambers light in the morning, girls. I hurried to dress, thinking it was fully half-past six—my clock had stopped. This is the trunk of silkalines and other possibilities of beauty at ten cents the yard. Come and choose the color and pattern for the curtains in your own room, Margery and Happie." She threw out several rolls of the prettiest materials, and the girls plunged into them ecstatically.

"Oh, Aunt Keren, do you think it would matter to any one else if we had this in our room?" cried Margery holding up a roll of silkaline, white with soft green maiden hair fern wandering over it.

"But only look at this yellow jasmine, Margery!" cried Happie, holding up a rival pattern.

"But green for our room with the morning sunshine to lighten it—would you mind, Aunt Keren?" persisted Margery.

"Why should I tell you to choose if I minded?" said Aunt Keren, but the pleasure in her eyes at their pleasure belied the gruffness of her manner.

That day the entire population of the Ark, excepting Penny and Dorée, but including Polly, worked on window curtains, hemming as fast as feminine fingers could fly, and tacking and hanging as fast as Bob could work.

When the sunset breeze wandered around the Ark, it found lovely wistaria blossoms in their green leaves to flutter in Mrs. Scollard's windows; the yellow jasmine responded to his fingers in Miss Keren-happuch's room; Bob offered him crimson roses, Laura and Polly's windows were hung with sweet pea blossoms, while the soft maiden hair fern blew into the two eldest girls' room, brushing lightly against the white counterpane on their bed. The newly kalsomined walls looked fresh and restful, and the sash curtains transformed the exterior scene, still bleak and forbidding.

But the Ark was doomed to ride on troublous waters for a time. The next day Mrs. Jake announced that she must return to her bereft family, and Miss Bradbury vainly went abroad in search of her successor.

"There is nothing for it, Charlotte and other children," said Miss Bradbury, after two days of scouring the country in Jake Shale's open wagon, "but for me to go to town and find some one there. Though how I shall persuade a person accustomed to city improvements, or pretty summer cottages, to come to our primitive Ark, I can't imagine. However, I shall go down on Monday to try."

"Oh! And leave us alone!" cried Margery.

"Yes, all of you alone. How can one leave 'us' alone? It doesn't seem likely on the face of it that half a dozen Scollards could miss one ancient Bradbury, does it?" said Miss Keren-happuch.

"You are the Head of the House, and it is hard to be decapitated, Aunt Keren," said Bob. But decapitated they were on Monday, when the weather wept copiously over their bereavement.

The inmates of the Ark awakened to the swish of rain against the small window panes, and to the thought of Miss Bradbury's departure. They discovered that in the few weeks that had passed since Mrs. Scollard was taken ill, Miss Bradbury had come to seem as much and necessary a part of their lives as their own heads and hands.

Happie and Bob met with dismal faces to offer their morning oblations of wood to the stove.

"If the violets would come, I could bear it better," remarked Happie suddenly.

"If the mud would dry up, and the roads get decent I could bear it better," retorted Bob. It was becoming a family joke, the number of things which they discovered would make life in the Ark bearable. For each of the family felt in the bottom of a courageous heart that the new conditions were hard to bear, and every night Happie lay down lonely and discouraged to wonder how she was going to face another day. Somehow, though, that other day never would seem dreadful to her when she opened her eyes upon it. It was always so beautiful, seen in the light of the sun mounting over the hills before her chamber window.

"I have engaged our friend Pete Kuntz to make the garden this week during my absence, and to put out our vegetables. Pete doesn't plant; he 'puts out' seeds. I shall expect Bob to keep it watered if nature fails us, as I should think she would have to after this flood—no wonder we call this house the Ark!" said Miss Bradbury, as she pulled on her gauntlets, and walked towards the door where Jake Shale was waiting with his drooping steeds to take her to the station. "And good-bye, my family. I shall return with my shield, and not upon it, for by fair means, if possible, but somehow in any case, I shall inveigle a woman up here to work for us."

She nodded to each one, patted Mrs. Scollard on the shoulder as she passed her—Miss Bradbury was not given to kissing—went out the door into the drenching rain, mounted the dismal wagon and slowly drove away.

"Now, motherkins, and other girls," said Happie, wheeling towards the door to hide her eyes, and hoping that the rising inflection which she had forced into her voice might be mistaken for the ring of happiness, "now, let's go up attic! We youngsters have been aching to get at it. I'd like to see if rain on the old attic roof sounds as sweet as poetry says it does—it's a good day to test it."

Margery sighed and Laura groaned. "It's perfectly dreadful!" she said. "I don't see how you can help minding such weather! Think of living here in such storms as this!"

"Yet fancy moving every time the weather changed, Laura," Happie retorted. "We would have to leave an order with Pete Kuntz, Jake Shale and some other teamsters like this: When the sun shines, don't come. If it looks cloudy, keep your horses ready to start if it rains. Then when it rains, hook up, as you would say, and drive right over to the Ark, to move the Scollards, because the third Scollard girl can't live in that house in stormy weather. Don't you think it might be hard to make them understand, Laura? For instance, what would they do if it was cloudy and misting a little? Or how would they know what to do in a shower? No; it's better to live in a house and never mind the weather once you have moved in."

Happie had rattled on, one eye on her mother's face, and was rewarded by her laughing a little when she stopped; her nonsense usually made her mother smile.

"Such a goose-girl, Happie!" she exclaimed. And Happie did not mind Laura's pouting at being made fun of, for she had accomplished what she had set out to do, and had tided her mother over the first consciousness of being left alone.

"I hope Aunt Keren will find a nice, clean, rosy-faced girl to help us, Margery," said Mrs. Scollard, as they mounted atticward.

"I wouldn't mind if she weren't young, and was as brown as a berry, if only she were nice and clean, mama," said Margery pensively.

"Poor daughter! I'm afraid you find exile harder than the rest of us," said her mother, laying her hand on pretty Margery's arm.

"Not a bit!" declared Margery quickly. "It isn't hard for any of us, for you are getting better!"

The steep attic stairs, intended apparently "for the use of flies," Happie remarked, issued into the single gabled room running the entire length and width of the house, dusty and musty, dark in the heavy storm, yet attractive with the charm no attic can escape. Happie plunged under the eaves, followed by Penny and Dorée, who had come up with them, the former singing in her crooning voice that sounded very like the latter's purring, which was loud, for the yellow kitten expected mice.

"There's an old trunk in here, motherums, a little hair trunk that has gone quite bald in spots," Happie called in a muffled voice from under the eaves. "It's as shabby as a trunk can be, but there are things in it—it is heavy—and there's a B in brass nails on one end. The Bittenbenders must have left it here. May we open it? What has become of the Bittenbenders? What was a Bittenbender anyway? And why did they go off and leave Aunt Keren their house, furnished, too, after its way, and with their worn-off-horsehair trunk left behind?" And Happie emerged from her dusty exploration, rubbing her nose violently, and making up queer faces to keep from sneezing.

Her mother laughed. "I don't know what a Bittenbender was, Happie dear, any more than you do. We know it was—collectively—the family who owned this farm, and who owed Aunt Keren more money than this place was worth, which was all that she could get in payment. Though if this farm were taken care of, it could be made a good one. As to the trunk, I'm sure Aunt Keren did not insist on that as a part of her bargain—it must have been left because it was not worth taking."

"Don't open the trunk to-day, Hapsie," protested Margery. "I don't like the rain on the roof nearly as well as I thought that I should. And it's leaking around that gable, and it is so dark and damp and dismal! Let's go down to the kitchen where it is warm and comparatively cheerful. At least the fire is red! Truly I can't stand this dank, dark, dreary, dusty, dismal hole and the beat of that rain."

"Poor Peggy! She's getting her adjectives high, and her spirits low!" cried Happie. "What is it about attic salt? Hers is lumpy from wet weather. Come on, you poor dear! We'll go down to the kitchen and boil eggs. Mother, when do you suppose we shall get anything to eat besides eggs? I asked Jake, and he said the butcher began coming through in June. Now what in the world does the butcher come through? And aren't we to have any meat till he has come through it? We cannot possibly live on eggs till June. We've cooked them in every way by this time, and they still come out eggs—more or less so, at least. For:

'You may boil, you may scramble the rest, if you will,
But the taste of the egglet will cling to it still.'

Laura, go first if you want to be noble, and be the cushion at the bottom of the heap of your family when we all tumble down these breakneck attic stairs!"

"Happie, what an absurd girl you are!" cried Margery. "Jake Shale meant that the butcher came through Crestville after June, carrying meat to the hotels beyond, and then we can get it easily enough. But it is serious business getting it till then. Aunt Keren said she would bring meat when she came back, and if she buys a horse, as she means to, we can drive somewhere where it is to be had."

"Won't it be fun, jogging around the country picking up a roast here and a chop there?" cried incorrigible Happie. "I hope it will be a horse that we all can drive."

"Aunt Keren said she should buy a cheap horse, too tired to be dangerous, and we are to rest him while we drive," said Laura, unconscious of Miss Bradbury's humor, and repeating with entire gravity this statement at which the others all laughed. "For my part," she added, "I shall be mortified to drive such a horse."

"You can sit on the back seat and look like a guest; Margery and I will drive," said Happie. She danced ahead of the others towards the kitchen, swinging Penny to her shoulder as she ran. She stopped short in the doorway with a shocked little cry.

"What's the matter?" said Margery.

"We have no horse to blush for, but we must blush for ourselves; the bread has run over the pans, and down on the table! Only look! And we are all so hungry! It must be as sour as sour! I'm so scatter-brained!" And Happie pulled her own bright locks with a contrite face, offering Penny the ear nearest the shoulder on which she was seated to be boxed. But Penny kissed her sister's flushed cheek instead.

[CHAPTER VII]
THE DOVE'S ALIGHTING

"It's all my fault," cried Margery repentantly, assuming the blame and the duty of repairing the damage to the snowy pine table at one and the same time. "I promised to look after the bread and put it into the oven, and between Aunt Keren's going and our trip to the attic, I never thought of it again. Bread is not such a simple thing; I wish we could buy our bread, as we did in town."

"No work is simple I find, dear," said her mother. "It takes all kinds of qualities to do anything well—which accounts for the prevalence of poor labor. Never mind the bread; it is beyond sweetening by any amount of soda. We will make more to-night, and subsist on biscuits and buckwheat cakes for dinner and supper."

"Buckwheat cakes are far from simple," Happie remarked, suggestively surveying a burn on her forefinger, the result of her recent failure with the delicacy in question.

"The cakes are simple; it's the griddle where the stick comes," said Margery.

"Literally, if you mean the sticking," smiled her mother.

Laura, standing with her face pressed against the steaming glass of the window pane, sighed heavily. Mrs. Scollard turned and crossing over to her side, looked for a moment out upon the reeking scene. The rain poured down in torrents, swept sidewise across the fields by the roaring wind. The ground looked black at a little distance, the trees bent their bare boughs to the storm's fury; not a sound, not a human being lightened the desolation of the outlook.

The lonely woman felt her heart tighten under the grip of a fresh tide of homesickness. Miss Bradbury had been trying of late to encourage her by hinting that if she were not perfectly restored to health in the autumn, she could spend the winter in the Ark, so at the worst there was no reason for anxiety. But what a life to lead, to condemn her clever children to! How could she bear it? Then the courage that made her all that she was, the courage that Happie had inherited, rose to answer her own question. She could bear it because she must bear it; she would fight for her health, and be able once more to work and to live for her children.

"When this storm has spent itself," she said brightly, "we shall see the spring fairly leaping forward in all its loveliness. This is a sort of aftermath of all winter's fury. It can't last long with such a wind as this raging, and when it passes you girls will find arbutus and hepatica, anemones, and very soon violets. It is going to be a wonderful country for flowers, for all sorts of beauty. I think we shall hear song birds in Crestville that we never heard before, and fancy what it will be to hunt for wild flowers at the foot of those glorious mountains! I think there could hardly be a more splendid view than ours."

Happie crept up and peeped slyly over her mother's shoulder. She saw a moisture on the long lashes that belied the blithe tone and the enthusiasm.

"It's just a trifle dim now, motherums," was all that Happie said, but the tone in which she said it made the words what they were meant to be—the salute of a good soldier to the courage of his superior officer.

"Oh, by and by will be a sweeter by and by, of course," Margery chimed in. "I suppose we shall all feel better when it clears up."

The dinner that day did not promise to be precisely a success. Polly and Penny had risen superior to the weather in such a game of romps that the baby appeared upon the scene decidedly cross. Bob came in wet through and exhausted from a tussle with the barn door which had to be rehung upon its broken hinges to protect the books still lying in their packing cases, stored in the rickety building. He found it impossible to talk; his muscles ached, he had pounded his thumb black and blue in his efforts at carpentering, and creeping chills, the result of his wetting, chased one another down his spine.

All that Happie had said of the preponderance of eggs in their limited bill of fare was strictly true. It was hard to consider a dinner satisfactory when its main dish was scrambled eggs, after one had had boiled eggs for breakfast, and was looking forward to fried eggs for supper. Dishes too had to be washed as they went along, for the supply of kitchen utensils was low until the mistress of the house should return with reinforcements.

"When we were in New York we turned a faucet, and took it for granted that hot water in the sink was a natural institution, like a hot spring. Now that we have to heat every drop we begin to realize it was a sort of phenomenon," sighed Margery, lifting the teakettle to the forward hole of the stove, and signaling Bob to put in another stick of wood before she set it down.

"We will hope that Aunt Keren may find the clean, rosy-cheeked young girl, or even the brown-faced-elderly-woman variation of the theme which Margery suggested," said Mrs. Scollard. "It is rather a struggle alone, without conveniences."

"There's a woman coming down the road, mama," said Polly, whose face, with Penny's, was pressed against the steaming window, looking out upon the universal wetness.

Laura dropped the towel, held ready for wiping dishes, though the water was not yet warm, and ran to look.

"She's very wet, mama, and she's fearfully long," Laura announced.

"And she's heading for here!" cried Bob, as if that were the acme of wonders.

"Can she be a lost Bittenbender?" suggested Happie.

The tall woman came in, when bidden to do so, and set herself, marvelously erect, on the edge of a chair.

"It's a very severe rain," remarked Mrs. Scollard, somewhat at loss how to treat her unexpected visitor.

"I've seen worse rains than this already," retorted the angular one. "Do you like it here?"

"We shall grow to be very fond of the place," said Mrs. Scollard cautiously. "We are trying not to be homesick. You see we have always lived in New York."

"And you are doing your own work yet!" exclaimed the visitor. "I heard you wasn't use to doin' nothin'. It's bad enough to be strangers without takin' all the hard jobs to once, yet! I wouldn't care if I was to help you a while; I've got time."

"Do you mean that you would stay here?" cried Mrs. Scollard, eagerly.

"Yes; I don't care if I do," answered the woman. "You just say so once, and I'll stay."

"Are you a losted Bippenbender? Happie said so," Penny cried shrilly and unexpectedly.

"A Bittenbender? What do you know about the Bittenbenders? No, I hain't a Bittenbender. I'm poor enough in money without bein' poor truck yet. My name's Rosie Gruber," said the stranger with an air of forever setting at rest any possible doubt as to her desirability.

Margery and Happie exchanged a sly glance of amusement; anything less like a rose than their caller would have been hard to find. But the important point was that she was willing to stay and do housework.

Mrs. Scollard, feeling that Miss Keren-happuch's quest was more than uncertain, and that almost any risk was better than their certain troubles, engaged her on the spot, and was as delighted as she was amused to see their new-bloomed Rose take off her wet hat, remove her long overshoes, produce from under the skirt of her own gown a blue checked gingham apron, and go down on her knees, instanter, to rake the ashes out from the stove.

"This fire's pretty near out," she remarked. "If you want to eat at twelve—you do, don't you?—you've got to get your potatoes over pretty soon, and this fire'll need an hour to get up. Your wood's almost all; hadn't you ought to git some?"

"Almost all what?" asked Bob. "Isn't it right; anything wrong with it?"

"It's almost all," repeated Rose firmly. "All—don't you know what that is? How many sticks do you see there? Isn't it almost all? Nothin' wrong with the wood if they was more of it. Say, there hain't nothin' wrong with the boy, is they? He looks so sorter dumb at a body yet!"

"He didn't quite understand," said Mrs. Scollard gently, as Bob turned away to conceal the broad grin spreading over his face as he caught their new acquisition's meaning, and Happie bolted from the room.

Peculiarities of dialect did not affect the relish of the dinner which this hardy Rose served at thirteen minutes after twelve. Everything did taste so good to the hungry, weary and lonely Scollards! Margery and Happie renewed their duets of old Patty-Pan days as they dried Rosie's dishes, and their mother sat down to write Miss Bradbury of her coming, and to tell her that she might return at once to the bosom of a greatly cheered family, for the maid they wanted had found them, and search for her on their side was no longer necessary.

The storm cleared away in the night, and the glorious sunrise of the morning ushered in the spring. With it came soft brooding days in which the grass and leaves wakened to life, the birds dropped down from the warm sky in daily increasing kinds and numbers, and the flowers of early May lifted up their delicate little faces. Polly and Penny came home daily with wilting hepatica and anemones and violets in their warm little hands, while the older children sought and found on their rambles the arbutus whose sweetness the winds bore into the chambers of the Ark, past the dainty new curtains.

Rosie proved a comfort in spite of angularity of form and peculiarities of speech. She was such a balm to perturbed minds and weary muscles that the children privately referred to her as "the Dove," for her coming had been the harbinger of peace to the Ark. She evidently regarded the entire family as helpless infants, needing her unceasing care and vigilance, and she gave them no less than she deemed they needed, piloting them through the waters of inexperience.

Miss Bradbury wrote that she was coming back. Margery and Happie speculated on the effect of Rosie and her employer on each other, but Happie felt sure that they would get on together, for each was in her way a character, and their sterling honesty was of much the same pattern.

Aunt Keren was going to bring them something that they would enjoy, "a species of toy," so she wrote, yet something that she hoped to make useful. They must get Jake to bring his three-seated wagon to the station if the young Scollards came to meet her, as she hoped they would.

They did, or at least Margery, Happie and Bob did, consumed with curiosity as to what they should find encumbering Miss Bradbury.

When she stepped briskly off the car on the steps which the grade of the track at Crestville compelled the porter to place for passengers, the Scollards saw her encumbrance, and hailed it with a shout. There, dismounting behind Miss Keren-happuch, so thoroughly laden that there seemed no question that lady was already making him useful, his cheerful face one mass of smiles, came Ralph Gordon!

Happie and Bob dashed at him regardless of a man with a fishing-pole, come up for trout, and collided violently with the combination. The brief mishap, though it left the traveler furious, did not dampen Happie's ardor. She shook both Ralph's hands so hard, and exclaimed: "Well, I never did!" so emphatically, and so many times, that there was no doubt of her pleasure at seeing her former neighbor. Bob slapped him on the back with such abandon that Ralph swallowed whole the durable black licorice drop with which he had been beguiling the last moments of the journey, and choked over it so violently that he had no breath to reply to the questions his friends hurled at him in rapid succession.

"I thought that you might like a guest, a crumb from your Patty-Pans, so to speak," said Miss Bradbury, surveying the effect of her surprise with much satisfaction. "Ralph has had a cold, and has been working too hard," she explained. "I need a boy to help Bob, so I took this one. I shall expect you to keep him hard at work, allowing no time for talk or play. How's your Charlotte-mother?"

"Better for your return, Aunt Keren," said Margery sweetly, but truthfully.

"What about Snigs?" asked Happie.

"At home with his mother," returned Aunt Keren. "But he will come up in the summer, by August, if not before."

"Is Ralph——" Happie began, but stopped herself before she had framed a question that might have been awkward to answer.

Miss Keren-happuch finished it for her. "Going to stay?" she said. "Yes, he is, or at least until something happens to call him home. Mrs. Gordon yielded to my arguments, and consented to lending him to us. I told her we needed him, especially Bob. So I captured him. Curious that I went to get a girl, and brought home a boy, an altogether unforeseen boy."

Jake Shale drove slowly up the hill. The young people talked incessantly, and all together. Miss Bradbury listened in a pleased silence that betrayed itself in her eyes, for her lips were unbending. She saw that already the effect of her transplanting the Scollards showed; they were blossoming out like the season under the warmth of freedom from anxiety.

Miss Bradbury found to her surprise that she herself was glad to get home, and thought of her coming in those terms. Down in the bottom of her staunch old heart, the good woman had not looked forward to a summer in the Ark with less than dread.

The children took Ralph out at once to display to him all the interesting points of Miss Bradbury's estate, leaving its owner to their mother, and to form the acquaintance of Rose Gruber, "the Dove," whose olive branch was waxing greener in the eyes of all the "Archeologists," as Bob called the inmates of the Ark. Though Happie said that she thought they "were more like Architects, for the dictionary said they made, built, planned, contrived, and that was a full description of the Scollards."

"The creek is high," Rosie called after Bob and Happie, as they followed Margery and Ralph out the side door.

"We are going over to it on our way back," Happie answered over her shoulder. "It does seem to me a pity to call a beautiful trout brook 'a crick,' just as if it were a sort of rheumatism! Brooks sound like lovely things, but cricks!" She ended her supplementary remarks to her companions with a tiny shudder.

"Books are in running brooks; is that why you like them?" suggested Ralph. "Or is it because they chatter, chatter as they flow—fellow feeling, you know?" He glanced slyly at Happie. "Creeks ought to chatter even more than brooks, being an American variety."

There was an old grist mill half a mile away from the Ark, turned, when it did turn, by a beautiful stream, a trout brook made up of many mountain springs, rising far up in the hills, and rushing through Madison County to the river, which should bear them on to the sea. Clear and brown were the waters of this brook, its bottom paved with stones, its banks, rising steep on the one side, and gently sloping on the other, grown with ferns, luxuriant with rhododendrons, and surmounted with pines, spruce and giant maples. It was an enchanted region to the Scollards, city bred, and "Patty-Pan" set hitherto. They were delighted to take Ralph to the brook and show him that if the Ark were shabby, the country was perfect—they discovered a strong sense of proud proprietorship in their breasts as they introduced Ralph to their haunts, and it dawned upon them that they must be beginning to feel at home.

The brook was indeed high that day; the falls over the mill-dam were yellow from the upstirring of recent rains, boiling and seething over the logs creditably to their exhibitors, and the foam-flecked waters ran swiftly down, under the bridge that crossed the road to their goal.

"Well, do you raise mermaids?" asked Ralph, pointing out into the middle of the stream. Then before the others could speak, his face and voice changed, and he cried out: "Good gracious, it's Penny!"

It was Penny, seated on a log which for the moment had lodged midstream, held by a rock which could not hold it long. In her arms the child held something yellow; Jeunesse Dorée, Happie saw at once. She looked wet, her soft hair hung heavy around her pale little face, but she held up her head valiantly, and clasped the kitten safe and dry to her breast.

"Happie, oh, Happie!" she cried, as she saw the group on the bank, and held out a hand appealingly. It nearly cost her balance; she shook on her perilous seat, and Margery hid her face, while Happie caught her breath.

Then she raised her voice and called: "Hold on, hold on tight, darling. Bob's coming!" As she spoke the log swung loose, and floated a few feet farther down the stream. Bob dashed out into the water, and Ralph followed him. The brook was so high, the motion of the water so swift that there was danger for one alone, should he lose his footing, and Bob could not swim.

Steadying each other, the two boys waded out, keeping upright with difficulty, and watching the rigid little figure towards which they were struggling, fearing every moment that it would be jarred from its perch.

The rocks were slippery under their feet, the water rose well above their knees, logs and debris came against them, the log drifted ahead of them, always a little further out of reach. Suddenly it struck against the support of the bridge, and Penny's head disappeared under the water.

It was Ralph, who, letting go of Bob's shoulder, threw himself downward towards the spot where the child had disappeared. As he did so, he heard the cry of anguish from the girls on the bank. He remembered, with a prayer in his heart, that the little creature would drift far more swiftly than the heavy log had done.

But in an instant she rose further down the stream, and Ralph struggled to his feet and threw himself towards her, instinctively realizing that he could reach her quicker by falling in her direction than by striving to walk or to swim in that seething water. Little Penny's devotion to her kitten was meeting its reward; clasping it tight to her breast, she could not throw up her arms, and her light body floated long enough for Ralph to seize it.

He pulled her towards him by her pink skirt, and Bob, seeing the rescue, darted to his aid, lost his footing, fell headlong into the water, but reached his friend nevertheless, and the two boys, with Penny and Dorée, clambered up under the bridge none the worse for their experience.

The terror-stricken girls ran, slipping and stumbling over rocks and roots, to join them, and nearly dismembered Penny in the effort to hug her simultaneously.

"We mustn't let mother see her like this; it would shock her too much even to think of the danger now it's over," said Margery. "We will take her to the barn and get Rosie to come there with water for a hot bath, and we'll put dry clothes on the darling, and mother shall not know of this till we are sure Penny's no worse for the scare. What were you doing, Pennypet? How did you get on that dreadful log, out in the middle of the brook?"

"I sat on it up by the dam," said Penny cheerfully—she was the least frightened of the excited group. "The log was up there when I began to sit on it, and Dorée was playing with me. He was playing he was a goldfish and I was a pink water lily—'cause I've got on my pinkie chamray, don't you see?" Penny indicated her best beloved pink chambray frock as she spoke, looking ruefully at its wet folds. "Then the log wented off—oh, Dorée and I played the goldfish had crawled up into the pink water lily, and we were having the most fun! That's 'cause I was holding him, don't you see? He had crawled up into the pink water lily, truly. But the log wented down the brook, and we didn't know it was going, but I wasn't much scared; I could hold Dorée, don't you see? And you came—I didn't know Ralphie had come to the Nark!" She reached over to pat Ralph's face. "I guess I could have sat on it ever so long—days 'n days!—only it bumped. I don't think Dorée's hurt." She peered anxiously at shivering Dorée, who was wrapped in her wet garments, making desperate efforts to get away and lick himself dry.

"I don't think he's at all hurt, you precious baby!" cried Happie. "Give me Dorée; I can keep him warmer than you can, because you're so wet. There! Now boys, hurry as fast as you can! You're both soaking, and I'm afraid Penny'll be sick, and I'm shaking with cold; I'm so nervous. Run!"

They ran, and by the time they had reached the barn, both the boys were warmed up. Rosie came out and rubbed Penny into a glow, put her into dry garments, and sent her forth, apparently as good as new.

Margery and Happie told the story of their adventure to Aunt Keren, but not to their mother, who was not yet strong enough to be startled.

Miss Bradbury listened to it without a comment, but when it was finished, she laid a hand caressingly on Ralph's arm. "I said I needed a boy! But I didn't know I needed a coast guard," she remarked. "You have begun your career in the Ark appropriately, Ralph; pulling in people from the flood!"

[CHAPTER VIII]
GRETTA

"Happie is beginning to be indeed happy, and without effort," said Miss Bradbury in high satisfaction as she watched her pretty namesake blossoming into increasing brightness every day. It was quite true that Happie was beginning to be happy without effort. The first symptom of her growing reconciliation with her new home was that the lively correspondence with the friends whom she had left behind was abating; she found the days too short for the delights that the farm had to offer her, and she had less and less time for letter writing.

Happie had found a new interest in life besides the many interests of her first country spring-time, and her growing intimacy with the wild creatures,—an interest not unlike the latter, but far more absorbing. And this is how it began.

One day she was walking alone down the roadside. The sun lay on her head as warm as if it were June, and the dust rose under her feet. Out of the tangled growth of the wayside came frequently the fluttering of wings, or a squirrel in vociferous haste, whisking his tail and scolding her.

She came up at last to the furthest boundary of the Ark farm, far down on the margin of the brook, and to the house nearest to the Ark. It interested her, because she had heard that in it lived a girl of her own age, together with two women who had the reputation of being decidedly cross, and of leading this young girl a hard life. They were her cousins, without whose dubious shelter the girl would have been homeless.

As Happie came up she caught a glimpse of a brownish sunbonnet, and paused to peer at her unknown neighbor, herself hidden by a friendly chestnut tree. She saw a pair of shoulders, unmistakably youthful, covered by a faded but scrupulously clean gingham, and a plump brown hand skilfully wielding a paint brush with which it was renewing the storm-beaten red paint on the posts which upheld the wire fence forming the farm boundary.

The girl stopped her work, and, with an upward movement of her arm, threw off her sunbonnet with the back of her left hand, and drew her arm across her warm brow. She had dark brown eyes, darker hair, and her skin was as brown as a berry, but beautifully clear, and her cheeks wore a flush as red as the tint of her red lips. She was so pretty that Happie caught her breath with the pleasure almost all girls feel in another girl's beauty, no matter what sarcasms are pronounced by boys to the contrary. There was a warmth, a charm about this girl that warm-hearted Happie was quick to feel, and with it a look of patience that went to her heart.

"She needs a friend," thought Happie, and went forward without a doubt in her mind that she could fill the want, not because she was conceited, but because her motives were too pure, and her impulse too kindly to allow a doubt of her reception.

"I think you must be Gretta Engel," she said, her sunny face wreathed in smiles, as she came up to the painter.

The girl started violently, and blushed to the dark hair lying in damp rings on her forehead. She quickly pulled her brown sunbonnet into place, and stared at Happie without speaking, like a frightened rabbit cowering beside the fence.

"I'm Happie Scollard, and I live—I'm living this summer—on the next farm, the one that used to be Bittenbenders'," Happie continued. "I've been anxious to know you; we're so near the same age, and such close neighbors."

She paused for the reply which did not come, and then, for lack of it, took up the conversation again.

"It's lovely here; those mountains are glorious. I was so lonely and homesick at first I did not know how to bear it, but I'm getting happier every day. It's a beautiful place, Crestville, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is," returned Gretta.

"Have you always lived here?" asked Happie.

"Yes, I have," replied Gretta.

"And I used to live in a flat in New York; you can't imagine what a change this is!" said Happie cheerfully.

"I guess," said Gretta, looking at the tip of her brush as if hoping it might help her.

"Don't you get lonely here? I do, though there are so many of us," persisted Happie.

"Oh, I don't know; I don't get much time," said Gretta desperately, looking about as if meditating flight from this determined girl with whom she had not the slightest desire to make friends, and whose accent and little air of being accustomed to another world than that of the country girl embarrassed and annoyed her.

To her dismay, Happie seated herself on the grass at her side. "I don't believe there's any risk in sitting on the grass, if it is only May," she said. "It's as warm as June, and it must be dry. I think you need a friend, Gretta, and I want you to look at me hard and see if you don't think I could be she. The girls in New York rather liked me."

She thrust her head forward, inviting inspection as she applied for the position, and Gretta looked into the laughing eyes, and into the sweet, dimpling face bent towards her. Her own dark eyes lighted with pleasure in what she saw, and in spite of her shyness, she laughed a little.

"You don't want me for a friend; I'm different," she said.

"You look nice," announced Happie emphatically, "and I'd like to have you try me. If you mean that I've lived in the city, and so had more chance than you to get at books, besides having a clever and learned duck of a mother to teach me, while you have been all your life motherless, and far from libraries and good schools, besides being as busy as a bee, I think that's more to your credit than mine. If we liked each other, I could give you what I got out of books, and you could teach me how to be useful—wouldn't that be a good bargain for us both?"

Gretchen Engel turned to Happie with full appreciation of the kindly tact that so delicately, yet firmly grappled with her unspoken sensitiveness, and put on a level with herself the sweet girl, whose advantages had been many, while hers had been none at all. Her eyes filled with tears; she had a nature that was profoundly loving, and she was starving for kindness. Something had set her apart from the other girls who gathered with her through the winter in the little schoolhouse, and she was scolded all day long for doing her patient best in her meagre and reluctant home. Happie had guessed right that she was desperately lonely; she had not begun to conjecture how lonely, nor how much despair was mingling in that loneliness, though Gretta was but a girl of fourteen. No one could have needed nor wanted a friend more than pretty Gretta.

Seeing the sincerity that shone upon her from Happie's face, feeling her lovableness as she felt the warmth of the May sunshine, Gretta succumbed to her charm, forgetting to be shy.

"You're good," she said decidedly. "I'd like to be friends with you, if you could stand me, but I don't know when we'd ever get to see each other."

Happie gave a little hitch to her chin that meant determination.

"You must be outdoors a good deal to get that beautiful brown tint of yours; it will be queer if we can't get together. I never saw a pair of girls yet that couldn't outwit a pair of old cousins if they set out to do it," she said. "They are your cousins with whom you live, aren't they? Rosie Gruber is living with us, and she told me about you."

"I guess it didn't lose much in telling," said Gretta flushing. "I hate to have folks pitying me, and saying what hard times I have. Not but what it's true, though!" she added in a burst of self-pity and of confidence in the sympathy which she read in Happie's face. "I wouldn't care if I did work all the time, though girls that have mothers get a little time to themselves, even when they're poor. But no matter what I do, it's the wrong thing, and I get so sick of it that I 'most give up. Yes, they're my cousins that I live with, and they grudge me a living, though I earn one hard. I don't feel to owe them one thing; I guess they'd have put me on the township, only they'd have had that much bigger taxes, so they kept me. When I'm a year older I'm going off to work for strangers. I believe I'd have asked your mother to have took me, only I heard them telling you had nice things, and had lived in New York, and I thought I wouldn't do for you."

"You poor Gretta!" exclaimed Happie patting the brown hand nearer to her. "I don't see how you live! Here am I loved to death, the loveliest mother a girl ever had, the best brother in all the world—Bob's a perfect trump!—and Margery's so pretty and sweet you couldn't help loving her—she's seventeen, and just bursting into young ladyhood. And Laura, well, Laura's all right, of course, and Polly's the most dependable, good little creature, and Penny—Penelope, the baby—is the dearest little four-year-old you ever saw. To think I have all these, and you have no one! It doesn't seem fair!"

"Yes, and you can go to school yet!" cried Gretta with a bitterness that she had not shown before in speaking of her cousins. "They won't let me go much, and we don't have good schools here anyway. That's why I hate to see folks; I don't know anything, and they'll laugh at my way of talking."

"Mercy, Gretta, that's nothing!" cried Happie energetically. "My mother says if a person has brains, nothing can crush them; they'll prove themselves in spite of obstacles, and if they haven't, no amount of schooling can give them. Now that we're friends—for we are friends and that's settled—I can help you lots, so easily that neither you nor I will know it's done. You can speak just as well as any other girl, if you won't mind a hint now and then, and I have loads of books to lend you. And you must teach me practical things, milking—Aunt Keren's going to get two cows—and churning and everything I don't know. Isn't that a large order to fill? Why, I begin to see why I came here, over and above mother's health!" Happie had grown brighter-eyed and more enthusiastic as she talked. "Mother says each soul has certain tasks set for it that no other soul can do, and that we are led along to places where our work is ready for us, and that we must be careful not to miss it when it comes to us. Maybe it was for your sake as well as mama's that dear Aunt Keren brought us all up here to her farm, which she had never seen, to spend this summer! Maybe it was because you were so lonely and needed friends so much. You've such a strong, beautiful face that I'm sure you are too fine not to get some slight chance to be happy and clever."

Gretta looked keenly and quickly at Happie, suspecting mockery in these compliments, for she mistrusted praise, having been carefully trained to consider herself far below meriting it. She saw nothing but perfect truth in the brown eyes gazing into her darker ones, eyes alight with overflowing love and the joy of the thought that their owner might do good to another who lacked so much.

"'CAN'T YOU EVER COME TO SEE ME?'"

All the repressed riches of the country girl's nature leaped up to meet the good offered her, caring less for the material good than for the treasure of affection, inestimable to one to whom it had thus far been denied, and who had more than most the capacity for receiving and returning it.

Gretta struggled for adequate expression, and missed it; she could not have voiced or understood what she felt at that moment.

"You're good," was what she said.

Happie understood. "So are you," she retorted. "And very lovable. That makes us both good, so we will have good times. Now go on painting, or you may get scolded. If I had a brush I think I could help you."

Gretta shook her head. "I'm used to scolding," she said. "And you'd get red paint all over your dress."

She dipped her brush in the pot, carefully scraped it on the edge, and made a vigorous stroke down the side of the post next in order.

"Can't you ever come to see me?" Happie asked as she watched her. "You know our place, the Bittenbender farm?"

Gretta nodded. "Mrs. Bittenbender was my grandmother," she said.

"Not really!" cried Happie. "Why, I've been wondering about that family, and you must know all about them! It seemed so queer for them to go off and leave their furniture in the house. Of course there isn't——" Happie stopped herself on the point of saying that there was not much furniture, fearing that Gretta might mind it, and said instead: "There isn't any reason why they shouldn't leave their furniture, only most people take it with them, or sell it when they move. And you are a Bittenbender!"

"No, indeed, I'm not!" cried Gretta. "My grandmother married Mr. Bittenbender for her second husband. She was my father's mother, and so her name was Engel before that. I guess her second husband mortgaged the place, furniture and all, so he had to leave the furniture. But he didn't have to give up the place if he hadn't wanted to. He had plenty money; he was an old miser. That's why he liked better to keep his money than to pay your aunt, so he gave up the place. My grandmother died when I was a baby. I guess that old Isaac Bittenbender wasn't too honest. My grandmother was a good woman, and they say she had a hard life after she married him. He got too old to farm towards the last, so he left your aunt take the place."

"He let my aunt take the place," suggested Happie, fulfilling her promise of hint-giving for Gretta's improvement. "They left an old, worn-off horsehair trunk in the attic. Some day when you can, you must come and open it. You are the nearest to being a representative of the family whom we have found here, and I'm dying to investigate that trunk."

"If there'd been anything in it worth seeing he wouldn't have let—have left it," said Gretta. "They say he was the closest man in Madison County. I heard he made my grandmother——" She stopped suddenly to listen. "I hear Eunice calling; she's the crossest of my cousins, if there's a difference. I've got to go."

She arose, and Happie was surprised to discover that her height overtopped her own by a full head, for she had thought of her as she sat as being rather short.

Gretta moved with a grace and dignity that also surprised her; there was a freedom in every motion, and a splendor of poise won from her intimacy with the mountains, which made Happie wish that she could see her clad in beautiful garments. But the faded reddish gingham gown, and the brown sunbonnet were far from unbecoming to the girl. Happie said to herself: "Why, I thought she was pretty, but I believe she is a beauty!"

Gretta stood for a moment dipping her brush uncertainly in and out of her paint pot, not knowing how to take her leave, once more self-conscious and embarrassed.

Happie solved the difficulty. "You won't mind if this Eunice does scold now, will you, Gretta? And you won't feel lonely? Because we are going to be friends forever and forever, amen." And she put her arm around the faded gingham-clad waist.

Gretta drew off and looked at her. "Oh, I guess you don't want me!" she said, But there was a ring of happiness in her voice, as if she were sure of contradiction.

"You'll see!" laughed Happie, and kissed her new friend. "At any rate I think I want you. Good-bye till next time. Can you come to see me?"

"I don't know; I shall be painting this fence for the next few days," said Gretta suggestively, as she returned the kiss.

"All right," cried Happie triumphantly, and ran away waving her hand to Gretta, who walked backwards looking after her, leaving a slight trail of paint in her wake which threatened trouble for her when it should be discovered.

"I have made friends with Gretta Engel," she announced, coming into the dining-room where her family were busied with helping or waiting for the dinner which Rosie Gruber was "dishing up."

"She's so handsome I couldn't tell you how handsome she is, and there is something about her that draws you to her like a magnet! I'm going to lend her books and give her pleasure, and she's going to do lots for me. I shouldn't wonder if we came here for her sake—partly, at least."

Rosie surveyed Happie with high approval; of all the young Scollards, Happie was her favorite.

"Gretta's the prettiest and brightest girl in Crestville," she declared. "But she's awful shy. If you've got her to talk to you, you've done wonders. And if you make her friends with you, you'll be doin' the best thing you've ever done in your short life. If you was to know the whole of Gretta's story, you'd think she'd had pretty hard luck. I'm glad you hain't one of the sort of folks that can't see through a faded dress, nor yet under a sunbonnet, Happie."

"If she's got Happie to take her up, she's had one piece of good luck," said Bob, who never hesitated to show publicly his appreciation of his sister. "Happie makes every one else happy—that's a well-wearing, well-worn family joke, Ralph—and she's not the sort to let them slip back again into unhappiness because she gets tired of her bargain, are you, Hapsie? Are you going to adopt your beauty?"

Margery, Laura and their mother laughed. The family had never exhausted the fun of the story of Happie's adoption of a colored girl of twelve when the young woman herself was at the suitable age of four. She had insisted on bringing big Cora Jackson home with her, and on opening her bank to take out her pennies to buy ice cream for her sustenance. She had been much grieved when her protégée had been found to have decamped, taking with her her little protector's gold shoulder pins, as well as Margery's new parasol.

Happie now joined in the laugh, but gave her decided little hitch of the chin.

"And if I did," she said, "it wouldn't be a bad plan. At least I wouldn't scold her all day and every day, as her cross old cousins do. And there's a great difference between the Cora Jackson of my childhood, and this pretty Gretta of my old age! You wait till you see her, Bob! She's far prettier than Allie Herford." Which was a home thrust, for Bob considered Allie Herford the prettiest girl of his acquaintance.

Ralph looked up quizzically. "Don't you mind 'em, Happie," he said. "I believe in your four-leaf-clover-of-the-fields, and that you will find her good luck. Besides, you must not let your young mind get embittered by these cynics. 'It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.' So it's better to invest your trust, even though your bubbles—bust. Pardon the inelegance, Laura; I did not realize that 'burst' only rhymed with 'trust' when it was 'bust,' until I was too far embarked on my poem to tack—to carry on my metaphor with an unmixedness that I hope you appreciate. Never mind if your Gretta deceives you!"

"I never knew any other boy so imbued with the poets!" said Margery in mock admiration of Ralph's outburst.

But Rosie, flying in and out with steaming dishes, was impressed only by the matter, not the manner of his remarks.

"Don't you talk silly, Ralph Gordon," she said spiritedly. "Gretta Engel never will deceive nobody. She will do Happie good too, and she's made a good bargain yet. Your meat's fried most too much. Set up and eat awhile before it gits cold."

[CHAPTER IX]
JUNE'S PERFECT DAYS

"Do you know we love the Ark?" said Happie to Margery, as they opened the back door to let in all the glorious outdoors June time, having at last succeeded in their ambition to get down one morning ahead of Rosie.

June had come softly, swiftly over the mountains, bringing all her wealth of beauty to the exiles from the lesser treasures of the city, a beautiful surprise in every hour. Robins were nesting in the gnarled apple trees; Happie looked into their homes every morning when she arose, sharing the happiness of the brooding mothers whose secrets she jealously guarded.

Grass and clover were beginning to blossom to be ready for harvesting on the fourth of July, cherries were reddening in the long sunshine of the perfect days, and nature generously seconded the efforts of the newcomers and of the carpenters in repairing and concealing damages to the neglected buildings of the new-old home.

Ralph and Bob were busy building chicken houses and tinkering on sheds. Miss Bradbury, in the innocence of her heart, had decided that it would be good to keep chickens, and they had been added to the stock of the Ark.

Rosie was most competent, slightly cross as quick workers are apt to be, but she took the direction and care of the household upon her shoulders, and Miss Bradbury was glad to overlook a snappishness which was, as Margery said, "merely the snapping of the crust; not one bit from her heart." It was worth while for the sake of being steered through the waters of her inexperience of farm life. They all felt that Penny was justified in her gravely uttered opinion that Rosie was "a lovely lady."

The family had discovered that Rosie had had her share of sorrow, represented by five child graves in the Methodist churchyard, and a living husband who occasionally called upon her. This Mahlon was working on a farm seven miles distant. Bob asked if he were employed as a scarecrow, for a more limp, lazy, incompetent creature was never seen outside The Wizard of Oz. He had a trick of standing on one leg, and swinging the other in unison with the arm on the same side which was an inexhaustible amusement to the children when he came to the farm. He talked in a high, monotonous whine which gave his long thin face the effect of a penny whistle emitting the sound—altogether a sharper contrast to energetic Rosie that he was would have been hard to imagine. The Scollards gathered that her struggle for existence when her children were coming, and quickly going to fill those little graves, had been harder than she said. They were glad for her sake, as well as their own, that she had closed her forlorn house, sent off her Mahlon to work in Zurich according to his ability, and had come to work for them according to her own, very different ability.

Competent as Rosie was, however, she was but one woman, and there was enough left for the girls to do to help her. Happie, on the whole and allowing for those days when the grasshopper is a burden, reveled in her tasks and sang about them all day long, getting brown and plump and prettier for her activity. Margery never reached the point of enjoying her share of the labor, which made it the more creditable that she quietly performed it each day, never complaining, still less shirking, for Margery had that fine conscientiousness which asks: "Should I?" and never: "Would I?"

Rosie came down in less than ten minutes after the girls, and altered the draughts of the stove instantly. Rosie always changed slightly anything done by another, being imbued with doubts of others' competency.

"What got you up so early?" she asked. "My alarm went off, but I laid a minute plannin' my work for the day."

"I couldn't sleep, I was so excited about that horse," said Happie. "I suppose I woke Margery, though I thought I was trying not to waken her. Just as soon as breakfast is over, and the work done I want to go over to tell Gretta about him."

Happie had gone on since she had scraped acquaintance with Gretta, cultivating her all down the fence line as she painted. When the posts were all done, and the double line of wire connecting gorgeous fresh red posts, Happie had completely exorcized Gretta's shyness. She had even followed her up when duty called her to decorate the posts nearest to the house, and had braved the forbidding glare of Gretta's cousins' eyes with such beaming unconsciousness of the possibility of any one's objecting to Gretta's having a friend that she had escaped being ordered away, as Gretta had prophesied that she would be.

"I'd hate to have them say anything to you," Gretta had said anxiously.

And Happie had laughed with a pat on Gretta's arm that was meant to be reassuring, but which sent a great blob of red paint on the flagstone walk.

"They won't say anything to me, Gretta," she had declared. "No one ever does. I'll smile so sweetly, they can't reflect back a frown."

"I'll have to get that off with coal oil," Gretta remarked, regarding the spot on the walk ruefully. "You don't know my cousins; they're not very good looking-glasses. They frown anyway, and they don't reflect you, no matter how you smile."

It was true that they did not reflect Happie's smiles, but neither did they frown. They regarded her with icy impassivity, glad in their hearts of a chance to see near by "one of the new folks" about whom they felt so much curiosity, and reserving their right to prevent Gretta's enjoying her when they saw fit.

Gretta was blossoming out under the new happiness and companionship; she was full of a quiet humor that delighted Happie, and she imitated her little niceties of speech with a quickness that rarely needed a second hint. But Happie had not thus far been able to overcome her shyness sufficiently to get her to meet any of the other inmates of the Ark, whom Gretta avoided under one head, as "the rest." She had begun to despair of ever making her one of their jolly little band when Don Dolor Bonaparte came to her aid.

"What is it to-day, Happie?" asked Miss Bradbury, noting the symptoms of haste in her namesake's breakfast preparations.

"I am going to trap Gretta with Don Dolor, Aunt Keren," laughed Happie. "I want to run over and tell her there is a horse coming, and I hope I shall be able to get her here to see him. You know Gretta is more than fond of horses, and they say she knows more about them than half the men around here; she can drive anything. I think I can coax her to the Ark by pretending we want her opinion of Don Dolor Bonaparte."

"I'm afraid, judging from Mr. Hewett's letter, that her opinion of him won't be high, and I'm certain she wouldn't have to be a horsewoman to drive him," said Miss Bradbury. "But by all means bait your trap with Don Dolor, and troll your woodland maiden to the Ark. I am curious to see the girl that attracts you so strongly."

"I'm sure we shall love her if Happie does," added Mrs. Scollard. Her cheeks were gaining a June tint. Smiling back at her, Happie thought that it was not strange that they were all learning to love the farm that was restoring her to them.

Happie hurried through her morning tasks and raced over to see Gretta. She felt quite sure that at that hour she should find her carrying water to the young lettuce plants which her cousins, Eunice and Reba Neumann, were raising for the hotels five miles distant on the mountains, which in July and August would be thronged with guests.

"Gretta, Gretta!" cried Happie waving her hands as she leaped the garden fence. "Gretta, Aunt Keren has had a letter from Mr. Hewett, her agent in New York, and he has sent up a horse. Bob and Ralph are going down to the station this minute to bring him up. I think he must be pretty bad, because this Mr. Hewett wrote that we were not to judge him by our first impressions. He says he bought him for next to nothing, but if he survives the journey, and we feed him well, we'll see that it was not only a charity but an investment to buy him. He says he has blood, though at first sight we shall think he has only bones. He says his name is Don Dolor Bonaparte—only fancy! You've got to come back with me and receive him. We don't any of us know anything about horses, except Rosie, and you know a lot. So you come back with me, and tell me what you think of poor Don Dolor." And artful Happie smiled alluringly.

Gretta looked up with a laugh in her dark eyes. "Maybe I don't see what you're after!" she said. "You want to get me started coming; I know! Truly, Happie, I don't like to see the rest. I don't know them, and if I did get over being afraid of them, still, I would never get time to visit. You bring the horse down the road and I'll see him there."

Happie folded her hands prayerfully. "Please, please, Gretta, come home with me and see the new old horse! Look at me; don't I look pleading? Have you the heart to say me nay, when I beg you with my paws folded, like a nice little dog, and say please so prettily?"

Gretta laughed. "You make folks do whatever you want," she said. "I'll come if you'll wait till I get these plants watered, and change my dress."

"I'll wait till the lettuce dresses itself for a salad and you for a visit, if you like!" cried Happie triumphantly. "Bob and Ralph have only just started for the station, and they won't get back for nearly two hours anyway; Jake Shale took them down, and you know that is slower than walking. So we've plenty of time."

"I've got to tell Eunice and Reba," said Gretta. "They may take a notion to make me stay home."

"I believe you hope that they will!" cried Happie reproachfully. "See here, Gretta, you'll find that the Scollards neither bark nor bite, because it is their nature to—not! They are the nicest things, every one of them! You'll like Margery better than me; that's my one fear in bringing you together."

"I guess not," said Gretta looking up at Happie from her knees as she weeded the lettuce with eyes full of dog-like devotion and admiration.

"You let me ask your cousins to let you go with me; they won't refuse you to me, for shame's sake. You've finished all your work for the morning," said Happie.

"Work's never finished," corrected Gretta out of her deeper experience. "And we haven't had dinner."

"Maybe it won't take long to look over Don Dolor; he may not be a large horse," suggested Happie. "Come along, Gretta."

Gretta ushered Happie into the fleckless kitchen. There were two gaunt women, looking past sixty, though neither could have been much past forty. One was stirring milk in a stone crock on the back of the stove, which was just thickening into perfection for schmier-kase, while her sister was tying on her sunbonnet with resolute jerks of the strings, and hunting for the basket to bring in more wood. Her movements were accompanied by a running fire of scolding about Gretta, to whose account she set down the absence of the basket, which all the time hung peacefully on a nail in full sight above the table.

"What's wrong with you?" demanded Reba, lifting the crock from the stove and setting it down with the emphasis of its weight. "It's easier using the wheelbarrow anyhow, but if you want the basket, there 'tis. I guess you're getting near-sighted."

"I guess!" retorted Eunice derisively. "Why didn't you hang that there basket alongside the stove? Here I've been a-huntin' and a-huntin' for it," she added, catching sight of Gretta, and quite ignoring Happie.

"Good-morning, Miss Neumann," said that young lady, somewhat daunted by the difficulties of this beginning, but holding to her courage. "My aunt has a horse just arrived, and I'd like to have Gretta come over to see him, please. You'll let her go, for a little while, won't you?"

"A horse? From the city? What good does she expect a city horse to be on these mountains?" demanded Eunice. "She'd better bought one up here, and saved the express on him yet!"

"Oh, I think this horse was sent into the country for his health," laughed Happie. "You will let Gretta come over, won't you?"

"How do you make out with Rosie Gruber?" inquired Eunice. "She's got such a temper, folks say, Mahlon can't stay home. She hain't clean; not what we call clean."

"Why, Miss Neumann!" cried Happie, shocked into undiplomatic defense of Rosie. "She hasn't a bad temper; she's only a little, wee bit snappish, and as to Mahlon, if it wasn't for Rosie he wouldn't have a home to stay in—but of course you know that even better than I do! And she's the cleanest woman! She's made our tumble-down old house as clean as wax. Rosie's a treasure."

"That house you seem to think so poor of hadn't ought to be yours anyhow," said the agreeable Eunice. "Old Bittenbender hadn't any right to give it over to your folks. There's cheatin' somewheres, but we couldn't never prove nothin'. 'Twan't his to give; we're certain of that. It ought to belong to Gretta here, and if she had it she could rent it out, or maybe take a couple of summer boarders after a year, or a couple of years more, instead of bein' a cost to us who need all we kin make for ourselves! Gretta, you git off that there bonnet and git up the potatoes. What you standin' round fer? Hain't there always work to do, I'd like to know?"

Gretta did not answer. She hung up her sunbonnet with quiet obedience, and took the tin basin in which to fetch potatoes. She seemed to recognize at once the uselessness of further pleas for her visit.

But Happie, seeing the clouding of the dark eyes and the look of shame on the pretty face of her new friend, cried out: "Oh, Miss Neumann, Gretta wouldn't be gone long! Won't you please, please let her come home with me? She hasn't been once! Are—you are going to let her come, aren't you?"

"Well, I guess she hain't goin' visitin' before dinner!" said Eunice. "She'd better not go no time. I tell her she'll find out what she'll git, makin' friends with a city girl like you, that'll git tired of her 'soon's you've got used to her, and then where'll she be, with her head all filled up with foolish notions, and tryin' to talk fine, like you yet? I've got my eyes open; I see just what you're doin' with Gretta. She'd better stick to her own folks, that's what she'd better! She come into the world to work, and she's got to work all her life. You won't do her no good, makin' her discontented and then leavin' her. I've been warnin' her, but she's like all girls—thinks she knows more'n older folks! I'm glad I've got the chanct to tell you to your face you'd better leave Gretta stay where you found her. I bet you laugh at her now when you git home with the rest!"

Happie's eyes blazed. She took a step towards Eunice, drawing herself up to the woman's height in her righteous indignation. Gretta quailed, even while she rejoiced that this time Eunice had met one who did not fear her.

"Miss Neumann," said Happie, trying to speak quietly, remembering that this woman was much her elder, and the imprudence of angering her further, for Gretta's sake. "Miss Neumann, I can't allow you to accuse me of being double-faced. When I say I admire and like Gretta I mean it, and when I speak of her, I speak as I do to her. If I were so treacherous, so mean as to pretend to be her friend and then went home and laughed at her I should be severely punished; my mother would have no mercy on a hypocrite. But why should I laugh at Gretta? She is pretty, gentle, refined, good, and patient as I never could be. I like her very much, and she knows I do. I'm not going to drop her, and I won't forget her. I wish you would not try to teach her to mistrust me; it's not fair. And even if she did come into the world to work—I suppose she did, because everybody has to work, one way or another—she came into it for lots else, and I mean to help her find the rest. It almost seems as if you grudged her love and pleasure. Of course you don't, because you couldn't, but it almost seems so. Anyway you will please never speak of me again as you did just now, because I can't possibly be called double-faced."

Gretta's heart thrilled as she listened to her friend pouring out her words more rapidly than her cousins had ever heard any one speak, but clearly, and with a dignity that struck precisely the right note of outraged honor and of self-restraint.

Eunice turned away her eyes from the girl's glowing ones; she felt the force of Happie's justice and her own meanness.

"I don't see what you're going to do about it whatever I say, and I hain't goin' to leave no one tell me what to talk about," she muttered. "I don't care what Gretta does. We took her because we had to, and she hain't never been grateful to us. If she wants to hang around you I won't stop her, but she can't let her work undone. Gretta, when are you goin' down cellar after them potatoes?"

"Now, Eunice," said Gretta. There was a new note in her quiet voice, and she immediately turned to Happie. "I've got to help with dinner now, Happie, and I may be busy a while after that, but I'll come over this afternoon to your house."

Reba looked up quickly from the cheese which she was straining through a cloth. "Yes, you go, Gretta," she said, and Happie went away wondering.

She was not sufficiently versed in human nature to know that Gretta's sudden accession of decision had come from two things. First, she was emboldened by Happie's encounter with her cousin, but still more was she forgetting herself, her dread of visiting, in the desire to prove to her champion that she held to her faith in her unshaken, and that she wished with all her loyal heart to make up to Happie for her cousin's hatefulness. In her desire to show her confidence in her friend and her gratitude to her, at last the fear of that vague "rest" of the Scollards had been lost.

Happie reached home so excited by her adventure with Eunice that she did not rush out to see the new horse as she had planned doing. Instead she regaled her family with the story, almost forgetting to eat, she talked so fast.

"Well, dear; I hope you weren't impertinent, but from what you tell me I think you weren't," said her mother, when the long tale was finished. "For Gretta's sake as well as your own you were obliged to vindicate yourself from the charge of insincerity. And more years do not warrant imputations on another's honor."

Rosie Gruber, taking part as usual in the family councils, here interposed. "Of course she wasn't saucy; Happie's never saucy. The idea of telling her to her face she was two-faced yet! You send them Neumanns to me! I'll tell 'em how you're always talking about Gretta and planning to help her! Two-faced, you! That's a good hint you give her about grudging Gretta friends; you hit her there, and she knew it. There never was such a jealous-hearted woman as Eunice Neumann. She hates to see any one havin' a good time. When Reba was young she had a beau—Eunice never did; there wa'n't a man in the township would have darst to keep comp'ny with Eunice, but Reba had a beau. And if that woman—girl she was then, but just the same's now at heart—if she didn't hint round and fuss round till she got him to stop goin' with her sister, then my name isn't Rosie Heimgegen, Rosie Gruber now! Reba'd be different if she lived somewheres else. Eunice nags and nags till Reba gits to snappin' back—there hain't many things so ketchin' as snappin'. Eunice grudges Gretta her board and keep, though she earns it good. She's mad to think Gretta's happier this summer. There is folks like that, all sour and clabbered like schmier-case——My days! That puts me in mind! I went off and let that pot too far front on the fire! I wanted to hurry it a while, but I guess it's hurried too much." And good Rosie rushed out to the rescue of her schmier-case, to which she was trying to convert the family, hurried so fast that Jeunesse Dorée fled to the windowsill for safety, a puff of nervousness.

Miss Bradbury looked at her namesake sternly, but there was a belying twinkle in her eye. "What do you mean by embroiling me with my neighbors, Keren-happuch?" she demanded.

"If the horse is Don Dolor, you are Donna Quixote, Happie," added Ralph before Happie could reply to the inquiry of the head of the house.

"Oh, well, Aunt Keren, Happie thinks you might as well be embroiled with this Eunice, I suppose, because she is making Gretta's life a roast," said Bob coming to his sister's rescue. "I am curious to see this field-flower—she must be a daisy!"

"She is," laughed Happie. "My goodness, she's coming now! She must have hurried off right after her dinner! I was afraid her courage would fail her when the time came. Bob and Ralph, slip out to the barn and don't show yourselves until you come around with the horse—then there'll be something to talk about, and she won't be shy with you. Margery, you come out after me, soon, and speak to her without my introducing you—you know how. Smile at her and speak in your soft voice, and she'll never be frightened. I'll take Penny out with me; Gretta loves babies, and Polly is too little to mind, so she can do what she likes. And mama and Aunt Keren might slip out when we are in full swing with Don Dolor, and Gretta may not realize she's meeting you. I guess she won't be shy if we sort of leak out, and don't all face her at once. Oh, Laura! Well, I think you'd better follow me at first."

"And what am I to do?" asked Rosie, amused, yet pleased with the pains Happie was taking to launch Gretta smoothly on social waters.

"Oh, you can do whatever you please, and help us out. You understand her, and she knows you. You make us laugh, Rosie. Come on with Happie, Penny-tot."

"Cabbages and kings!" cried Bob. "It's worse than snaring a timid fawn, or catch a dicky-bird with salt! I hope she's worth the trouble." And he departed stableward with Ralph to carry out their part of Happie's programme.

[CHAPTER X]
HAPPIE'S TEMPTATION

When it was all over, and "the rest" had been met by easy and reassuring stages, Bob said that he believed Gretta was worth the trouble. Happie was satisfied with this concession; she expected no greater enthusiasm from Bob on the subject of a mere girl.

When Don Dolor was led out, Happie saw the force of his christening. Polly said, without intent to be funny, that "he was more like a clothes horse"; the framework of his anatomy was nearly as fully in evidence.

"Oh, the poor thing!" cried Happie, instantly loving him because of his unloveliness.

"My goodness, it's time he was sent into the country for his health!" cried Gretta, shocked into forgetfulness of her shyness. "But he isn't old, and he doesn't look sick; he's been starved and overworked. He'll come out all right."

This dictum was a great comfort, for Gretta was supposed to know more about horses than many of the Crestville men; she loved them, and had learned about them through that love.

"I don't think he ought to walk about," said Polly anxiously. "He looks as if he might go all to little bits. Can't you just rest him, Bob?"

"We're going to let you ride him up and down in your doll carriage, Polly," said Ralph.

"It isn't big enough," said serious Polly, and Gretta laughed as heartily as the others.

Gentle Mrs. Scollard's greeting left the girl timid and awkward, while Miss Keren-happuch she answered without hesitation, and with a laugh in her eyes, to Happie's surprise, who had looked for the reverse effects.

Then Don Dolor was led back to his sore-needed rest, and as Gretta said she must not stay this first time, Margery and Happie walked down the road with her.

All down the road Margery laughed at Gretta's funny sayings, while Happie looked as proud as a cat with a kitten.

"Come soon again, come often after tea," said Margery, as they paused at the Neumann gate for the prolonged parting of girlhood.

"I shall," said Gretta with a prompt decisiveness that delighted Happie. "After I get my work done, my cousins haven't any right to keep me home, and I'm coming if you'll leave—let me."

"We'd be only too glad," said Margery heartily. "We haven't any girls up here to run in; all our friends are in New York, so come up to keep us from getting lonely, Gretta."

Happie only squeezed Gretta's hand. She was delighted that Margery and her "treasure trove," as the boys called her, got on so well together, and bright visions of Gretta's future danced before the warm brown eyes which revealed to the world the love in Happie's generous heart.

A week later Miss Bradbury came down in the morning with the ravages of sleeplessness plainly visible on her face.

"I've heard noises all night," she said in reply to inquiries. "I don't know what they were, but I dislike them. Boys, I wish you would drive down to the store and buy that watchman's rattle we saw there, and stop at Peter Kuntz' and tell him I'll buy his dog."

"There wouldn't be much use in rattling, dear Miss Keren," laughed Mrs. Scollard. "Nobody could hear you."

"And don't you know you asked us to put those bean poles in the garden, and set the pea brush?" added Bob. "They really need doing, and we can't do that and go to the village too."

"Then Happie must get Gretta to drive down with her," said Miss Bradbury decidedly. "I haven't been free from nerves all my life to let them get the upper hand of me now without an effort to check them. I must have the rattle and the dog. Don Dolor is able to make the trip now."

He was. If any one doubted the effect of plenty of food and care, Don Dolor Bonaparte, could he have met the sceptic, would have converted him by the most eloquent of preaching—personal example. In that one week he had become another horse. He had put on flesh, he had begun to get glossy, he held up his head as hope awoke in his equine breast, and he showed unmistakable symptoms of returning to the beauty that had once been his. Bob was devoted to him; he had hard work to tear himself from him long enough to perform his tasks on the farm, which were many and irksome, and took a great deal of time.

When they had leisure, Bob and Ralph took their books into the orchard where they allowed the don to graze while they read, prostrate in the long grass. Poor Don Dolor appreciated the kindness to which he was not accustomed. Sometimes when Bob was deep in his plot, the don would come up and nose him caressingly as one who would say: "You can't imagine how different all this is, nor how I thank you!"

So he was entirely able to go to the village in pursuit of his mistress' rattle and dog, and Happie was only too glad of the chance to borrow Gretta and take the drive. She had found the drive up from the station almost too much for her on that April night when she had first taken it, but how pleasant it was now to go slowly along the shaded road, hearing the quail whistling in the fields, and the catbird warbling his June ecstasy!

"Somehow I feel as if I had never seen the country till this year," said Happie looking about her with ineffable content as she and Gretta wound carefully down the steep hill. "It's queer, because I used to go away every summer till the last two, but I feel as if something had awakened in me this year; it all seems different and lovelier."

"That's because you had a hard time before you came. It makes people see and feel to have a hard time—unless it's a hard enough time to dull them," said Gretta. "That's one reason, and the other is that you have a home here this year. I never was away from here, but I'm pretty sure no other place ever looks the way home does. You wouldn't see this road as you do if you didn't feel your home was at one end of it."

Happie turned in her seat to look at Gretta. She considered her clever, but she was perpetually surprised at the insight this girl betrayed, now that she dared reveal herself.

"I see that's true when you say it, Gretta," she cried. "But I don't believe I should have found it out for myself. How do you know things like that?"

"I've been alone 'most all the time," said Gretta. "That makes a body think; I always thought more than I talked. Then not having any real home of my own makes a difference. I always felt I'd love my own home, because I love Crestville so, even if I can't love Eunice's house much. I guess it's because I've had hard times myself that I know what hard times teaches people."

"Teach, dear, when there are more than one thing of which you are speaking," said Happie, with a pat of apology for the correction.

But Gretta did not mind being corrected. "Teach, then," she said. "But it seems queer to take off an s on one word, when you put it on the other. I'll never learn."

"You learn wonderfully; it doesn't matter much anyway," said Happie with a new perception of essentials of which she would not have been capable a year before. "But it does matter that you have hard times! Cheer up, pretty Gretta! I'm certain they won't last much longer."

"They're half over already since you came," said Gretta with her adoring look.

"You love this place," Happie resumed, acknowledging this remark with a squeeze, "and you'd like to live here all your days—you'd be perfectly happy if you owned a house like the Ark, for instance. Yet here am I wondering if I can stand living in it, for unless mother gets decidedly better, Aunt Keren says we may stay on in the Ark all winter, and of course we should have to. Isn't life queer and mixy? By the way, what did your Cousin Eunice mean that day when she made me so hopping, by saying you ought to own that house?"

"Nothing; just nonsense; Eunice is always saying things," said Gretta hastily. Which was so true that Happie accepted the answer without further thought.

They drew up at the little store, which was at once a miniature department store and the post-office. A rail ran along the upper side of the store for the convenience of customers whose horses would not stand without tying; here the girls fastened the don, who stood out quite beautiful in contrast to a dingy white horse on his right, a horse all speckled with black, as if some one had been doing spatterwork on him with an unsteady hand and too coarse a comb. On the don's left, to enhance his line lines, drooped Joel Lange's café au lait mule, and Happie suddenly felt proud of her well-built steed.

Happie took her mail and followed Gretta to the other side of the store. There were two letters for her mother, one for Margery and three for herself, besides Miss Bradbury's daily budget of letters and papers, and Ralph's equally reliable letter which came every day from his mother and Snigs.

It proved how far Happie had traveled on the road to contentment and interest in her new home that she no longer tore open her New York missives with trembling fingers and brimming eyes as she had done during her first six weeks of exile from her friends.

Gretta was buying blue and white checked gingham for aprons, thread, outing flannel of a despondent shade of gray to match Eunice's sample, stove blacking and a bread pan, bartering for a small portion of the cost of these, twenty-seven eggs which her cousins had confided to her care for this end.

Happie bought only darning cotton, but she invested in fig paste and sour balls, the most attractive candy that she found in the boxes ranged side by side in the show-case. They had red-lettered labels on their ends of such misleading character that it was evident that they were boxes remaining from bygone days, whose original contents had long been purchased by youthful Crestvillians.

"I can't get the brown calico Reba wanted; it's all," said Gretta, and then blushed at her relapse into the vernacular and added hastily: "I'm ready if you are."

"I'm ready," said Happie, wrenching herself from the contemplation of the portraits on a poster of some incredibly corpulent hens and pigs, professing to have been nourished by a powder which the poster advertised.

"Wait here and I'll bring the horse to the steps," said Gretta, going with indifference between Don Dolor, the café au lait mule and the spatterwork horse.

Happie jumped into the buggy, smiling with pleasure. There was something cozy about a trip to the village store, doing everything for oneself, and watching life at close range. She had completely forgotten the original errand on which she had come.

Don Dolor trotted along briskly, head up and his black flanks shining in a way that reflected credit on Bob's amateur grooming, for they shone enough to reflect anything else as well as credit.

"I'll read my letters if you don't mind, Gretta," said Happie. She had fallen into the habit of reading the girls' letters to this lonely girl at her side. Happie's friends belonged to the world into which her father and mother were born, a world of wealth and pleasure, and their letters gave Gretta insight into lives very different from her own, into which they brought new personal interests. She had grown to know Happie's friends through this introduction. Happie now read pages of merry-making at the seashore, whither Edith had gone early; of still gayer doings in New York, where Elsie Barker lingered, going to roof gardens and summer operas to her lively heart's content, and of the most delightful times of all which Eleanor Vernon was having traveling up the Hudson to Niagara, the St. Lawrence, Montreal and Quebec.

Happie drew a long breath as she laid down this last letter. "That's the trip I most want to take on this side the ocean," she said soberly.

Gretta looked at her anxiously. She was more than desirous that Happie should not miss her old friends, nor long for the pleasures of town, and her chief earthly hope just now was that Happie might become too attached to Crestville to be willing to go back.

"I don't see how you stand it," she said, with the deep design of hearing what Happie would reply. "Don't you wish that one of the fairies you were reading me about would fly down and offer you the chance to get away from here, and have the kind of good times your friends are having?"

"It might frighten Don Dolor; I think from his appearance when he came that he isn't used to good fairies," laughed Happie. Then the smile faded and she looked gravely up the road ahead of her. It ascended steeply, and as they followed it the mountains began to come in sight over the hill crest. All along the way the huckleberries were in bloom, and the sheep laurel touched grayness of rocks, and brownness of ill-nourished brambles into brightness with its purpling pink.

Up the rough roads which opened at intervals through the woods on either side of the main road, one saw masses of pink and white beauty, announcing the perfection of the mountain laurel growing and blossoming aside from the thoroughfares. And the rhododendron buds of the previous autumn were swelling and showing pink along their cone-like edges, under the light brown of their sticky outer covering. Soon the roadside would be glorified by their splendor. Cleared fields made patches of vivid green against the serried trunks of the trees in the woods, and the breeze blew down, pure and vivifying from the mountains.

Happie drew another long breath. She would like to join her friends, but this was beautiful. It seemed, even to her inexperience, a life of greater reality; of peace that was beyond estimate, and she was not sure that she would give it up if she could.

"I don't know, Gretta, whether I wish for that fairy or not," she said seriously. "I do begin to love my life here. Of course those letters set my feet twitching and my heart throbbing to go after those nice girls and their nice times, but I'm not sure. And when I think of you, and that you'd miss me and be more lonely for having had me, then I am sure! I am glad to stay here, Gretta," she added, remembering that this was what Gretta was longing to hear her say.

Gretta smiled, and then sighed. "You try to think so, but I wouldn't like to give you the chance to get away; I'm afraid Crestville couldn't hold you."

Gretta jumped down at the Neumann gate and Happie drove home alone, a task that would have been adventuresome, considering that she had never driven, had not Don Dolor a strong desire to get back to his stable and an accurate knowledge of where to find it.

"Hallo there, Icaria!" cried Bob coming around the corner to help his sister. "How did you get on driving the borrowed chariot?"

"I couldn't be as classical as you are, not if I were a Wingless Victory," said Happie, stubbing her toe as she jumped from the buggy, and landing on one knee on the turf.

"You're wingless all right," laughed Bob. "That comes of trying to wither your brother when he makes graceful allusions to Icarus—gets his genders right, too!"

"Pooh! You got Ralph to help you with that careless allusion; got out your Bulfinch's Age of Fable to find out who it was that drove his father's chariot, most likely, to be ready to impress me," said Happie rubbing her bruised knee. "We got on all right; I believe the don's going to turn out a fine horse."

"He's one already," said Bob. "Come to ride to the barn, Penny?" he asked as Penny appeared on the top step looking wistful. "And Laura, the dignified? Ralph is going to take the horse around. Any one else coming forth? You can ride in layers such a short distance."

"I don't mind if I come fourth," said Polly, misinterpreting Bob's meaning. "That'll be two for the seat, and another two in their laps."

"Twice two are four, problematical Polly," laughed Bob. "You are forth already in my sense, but you may be fourth in yours, if you want to be. Go ahead, Ralph. I'll be there on foot in a week or so to unharness."

Happie ran into the house. She found her mother sewing, and Margery, looking sweet and young ladyfied, bending over her Mexican work.

"Six letters, motherums; two yours, one Margery's, three mine," Happie said, throwing herself down and fanning herself with her hat.

Mrs. Scollard read her first letter, which proved to be but a note, then opened the second one, read it, glanced at her two daughters with heightened color, and read it over. The elder girl was reading her letter from a girl friend, and trying not to show that it moved her, while the other munched a square of fig paste, looking absently out of the window, blissfully unconscious of what was in her mother's mind.

"This letter is from Auntie Cam, girls," Mrs. Scollard said at last.

"Yes, I thought so," said Happie. "She's a nice Auntie Cam, nicer than most own aunts; what does she say? I was wondering, motherums, if Aunt Keren would mind if we got a boulder and made a rockery out there on the side of the lawn? Only it isn't a lawn; it's just grass."

"Now, Happie, why don't you let mother tell us about Auntie Cam?" protested Margery. "As if you wanted to make a rockery this moment, right on top of your own question!"

"Somebody—two bodies, in a way—has an invitation from Auntie Cam that I rather dread to deliver," said their mother slowly.

Happie straightened her listless young figure and Margery dropped her letter, turning to her mother with parted lips, that asked the question they did not utter.

"Auntie Cam says, my dear lassies, that she would like to have Happie"—Margery turned away to hide the tears that sprang into her eyes in spite of herself, and Happie caught her breath—"have Happie come to her in New York, where she has returned on business for a few days, and go back with her to spend the rest of the summer with her and Edith at Bar Harbor, coming home by way of the White Mountains in September."

"Oh, mother, mother!" cried Happie springing up and whirling about in a delirium of joy.

"And she says, furthermore, that Elsie Barker will be there next month," continued Mrs. Scollard.

"I know, I know; I got a letter from her to-day! Did you ever hear of such a magnificent, glorious, blissful thing in all your life?" Happie demanded of no one in particular.

"Auntie Cam says that she asks Happie because she is Edith and Elsie's friend, and because she regards her as especially her girl, but that if for any reason Happie would not care to go, or could not go, she will take Margery instead, and not quarrel with her good fortune, but consider herself very fortunate—so she says—to be allowed to borrow either of my girls," said Mrs. Scollard with a smile of pleasure in this appreciation of her girls. "Now the invitation is Happie's first, I gather from your showing no sort of reluctance when you heard of it, Hapsie dear, that you are willing to accept Auntie Cam's invitation. There isn't much need of asking if you want to go! I didn't realize that you would hail the chance to get away with such boundless rapture; I really thought you were getting contented in Crestville. You have been a good child to hide your feelings so bravely, Hapsie-girl, and you deserve your good fortune. What's the matter?"

Happie's ecstasy was fading out, and in its place a troubled look was creeping into her eyes as she turned them upon Margery. Margery had risen, and was looking so hard out of the window that there was no possibility of thinking she was interested merely in the familiar apple trees and the long grass, fast ripening into Don Dolor's hay. It did not need the tear that splashed on the window sill to tell Happie that her sister was struggling to hide a disappointment too bitter to be borne without a struggle.

Happie spoke slowly, with an effort. "Why, I have been contented here lately, motherums," she said. "Of course I was glad at first when I thought of going to Bar Harbor, and with Auntie Cam. It would be a perfectly scrumptious time! But when I remember how long it would be—I'd have to be away from home so long—maybe I'd better—I don't have to decide this minute, do I, mother?" She stopped her hesitating suggestions, feeling that her voice was getting unreliable. It seemed to her that never in all her life had she been so tempted.

Her mother saw her glance at Margery, and divined the truth.

"My dear, unselfish girl!" she thought. But all she said was: "Of course you do not have to decide at once, Hapsie. You ought to have at least one night in which to decide between the rival attractions of two such resorts as Bar Harbor and Crestville!"

Happie smiled dismally. "I'll go up-stairs to think; I can think better there. I'm afraid when I look out of our window at my mountains I'll decide to stay here," she said, and ran away with her brown paper bag of plebeian candies on which a tear of sacrifice fell as she ran.

[CHAPTER XI]
HAPPIE'S CHOICE

When she left the room Happie knew that her decision was already made; she had run away only to gain strength to announce it.

She closed the door behind her, tossed her bag and hat on the bed, and dropped into the willow rocking-chair by the window that looked towards the east and the mountains. Polly's big doll had to be dispossessed for her benefit, so Happie considerately took her bisque niece on her knee, in fair exchange for Phyllis Lovelock's seat, which she usurped.

"Margery wants to go," announced Happie, absentmindedly rearranging the doll's hair. "She thought at first that it was she who was to go, and when mother went on to say that I was Auntie Cam's first choice, she had to walk away to the window 'to hide her grief,' as novels say. She didn't hide it so very well; I saw that tear fall on the window sill! Of course I shan't go; that's settled." She pointed this announcement by a vigorous jerk of Phyllis' arm which sent it upward, giving the doll the effect of appealing to heaven to demand if this were not hard.

"No one will ever know how much I wanted to go—not if I can help it! Elsie and Edith both there, and boating, and bathing, and dancing—oh, me! Margery hasn't a friend there, but then the rest will be good for her; she looks tired all the time, and of course she'll find nice girls whom she will like—Margery makes friends. She doesn't like living here, and I do—or at least I think I do when there isn't any chance to get away. No; that isn't honest: I do like it, very much! Didn't I tell Gretta this very afternoon that I was glad to stay here? She said she wouldn't like to give me a chance to get away. And there was the chance in my hand that very moment, and I did jump at it wildly the instant I heard of it! Gretta saw clearer than I did! Poor Gretta! What a mean thing I am to fly off and forget all about her the first time I am tempted—but this was a fearful temptation, Edith and Elsie and all!" She pushed down Phyllis' upraised arm, and stood her upright with one foot on her knee, the other at right angles to the doll's body as it had been bent in sitting.

"You look rakish, my dear," remarked mercurial Happie, straightening the misplaced member and smoothing her niece's gown. "Or are you hinting that I should not kick? I'm not kicking, miss, in the first place, and in the second place you should not use slang. Margery is older than I, and fonder of society; she isn't as happy as I am here—that is not intended as a pun on my name, Phyllis—and she has been so sweet and patient that she richly deserves her luck. I don't grudge it to her, not one bit, and I wouldn't go—now that I've had time to think about it—not for anything! I couldn't enjoy one moment remembering I was there at Margery's cost. But I think, Miss Phyllis Lovelocks, that you might allow me one little natural pang, all by ourselves, because I'd have had fun without end all the time I was away. You might admit—since no one hears us—that dusting, bed-making, dish-washing palls on one occasionally, and even weeding a garden on a hot day is not pure bliss. I don't suppose there was a weed in the Garden of Eden, and anyway Eve's back didn't ache; it's only sinful backs that ache." Happie laughed again and wiped away a few tears that still betrayed her.

Then she arose, depositing Phyllis Lovelocks once more in her place in the rocking-chair. She stood for a moment looking out seriously on the mountains. Then she sighed, smiled and turned away.

"I really do love you, and I think I should miss you and be glad to get back to you. But it's lucky you're so big, because you've got to take the place of a big chance," she said, turning away as she heard her mother come up-stairs and go into her room across the narrow hall. Happie threw open her door and ran after her, hoping that there were no telltale stains on her cheeks.

"Mother, mama, motherums," she cried. "Let me come; I want to tell you. I'm not going."

Mrs. Scollard turned quickly and threw her arms around her girl with a movement entirely girlish. "You dear Happie!" she cried. "I knew you wouldn't, and I know why! You should have done precisely as you chose, my darling, but I really think that Margery ought to go, and needs the pleasure more than you. Margery is drifting in young ladyhood, while Happie, I am thankful to say, is unadulterated girlishness still."

"Of course she's the one to go, motherums; she's ever so much lonelier here than I am," said Happie staunchly. "You see when I flew up so rapturously, I hadn't had time for second thought."

"Proverbially the best," supplemented her mother. "I am very glad that you reconsidered, Happie, but I'd like you to understand that I see clearly through your transparent little self, and realize what you are doing for Margery."

Happie blushed and turned away. "Oh, I want to stay," she said lightly.

"Of course you do," assented her mother. "There are many different ways of wanting a thing, my Hapsie. But I'll tell you in strictest confidence that I am selfishly glad that I am to keep you. I don't see really, how we could have borne up if Auntie Cam had carried off the Ark's sunshine."

Happie turned back to give her mother an emphatic and hasty kiss before she escaped; she was still perilously near to tears. Her mother's words had robbed her sacrifice of all sting, as Mrs. Scollard knew that they would, for Happie dearly loved to be a comfort.

Margery received the decision that Happie was to stay and she to go with a solemn rapture, too deep for words. The next few days were given up to hurried preparations for her departure. The invitation had come on Wednesday, and Mrs. Charleford, whom the young Scollards had known all their lives as Auntie Cam, had arranged that her guest was to come to her on Monday.

It was short notice and rapid work; the Ark was submerged in the waters of confusion. Still, as Rosie Gruber sensibly observed: "There wasn't no use in worrying. What Margery had she had, and what she hadn't she hadn't, so what good did it do to git all dragged out fussin' over things yet?"

That good and efficient person ironed at night and arose an hour earlier than her four o'clock routine to lend her useful hands to preparing Margery's wardrobe.

"Fortunately you are still a young girl, dearie," said her mother folding the soft mull which Rosie had pressed. "You are still in the class which the fashion catalogues call: Misses. In another year you will be old enough to require more if you go into the great world, but simplicity is fitting and fairest for a young girl. This is your last year of slipping into the throng unheralded, Margery; make the most of its advantages, dearie. I really think you are sufficiently provided, without being obliged to add: 'Considering.' Your last year's gowns are so refreshed that I am satisfied with your little wardrobe, at least for this season, while you are still little Margery."

The mother's voice was wistful. Margery was so sweet and gentle that her gentle mother clung to her passing hours of young girlhood, shrinking from the thought of life and its burdens which stood just on her threshold, stretching out siren hands to her eldest born.

Miss Bradbury came into the room with six handkerchiefs in one hand.

"This is my contribution to your outfit, Margaret," she said. "Dainty handkerchiefs and good shoes are my weakness. Don't shed a tear on one of these; that's all I ask."

Margery thanked her with her gentle smile. She did not know until later, when she shook the first of the pile out of its folds, that Miss Keren had laid two crisp ten dollar bills between them, guessing that Mrs. Scollard's slender store was too depleted to allow her to give the girl much money to use as young girls like to use it, for the candy and soda, and the small luxuries of the toilet dear to seventeen.

"You've been a perfect darling, Happie; a dear, unselfish, blessed old darling, all the way through!" cried Margery throwing her arms around her sister, although in one hand dangled four belts, and the other clutched a bunch of turnover collars. Happie had just brought Margery her two stick pins, and delicate neckchain of fine gold links, holding turquoises set in dull gold.

"That's all right, Margery; you mean well, but your remarks are a trifle unjust to me. I am all of those things you mention, all of the time, yet you seem to be a trifle surprised. It would give a stranger a false idea of me, Margery; I am obliged to protest against your injustice," cried Happie with a mock frown.

"Isn't she nice?" exclaimed Polly from her vantage point at the foot of the bed where she was ensconced with her doll, watching the packing.

"I hope you will enjoy the orchestras and the music in the hotels, Margery," said Laura with an air that suggested its being extremely unlikely. "It's dreadful to never hear any music; there isn't a bit in Crestville."

"It's dreadful to split infinitives, Laura," said Bob, entering unexpectedly. "What's the wail about now? Still poor old Crestville? Besides, you're wrong about the music; I know of several melodeons in town. Ralph and I are going to the store; want anything from the emporium?"

"Yes, and two or three of the girls taking lessons by correspondence yet!" exclaimed Rosie indignantly from the depths of a Gladstone bag which she was sweeping clean of imaginary dust. "We're not so dumb here as Laura thinks. Don't you fergit my blueing, Bob, and I guess you might as well bring along some flour; ours is almost all, and I've got to bake to-morrow, with biscuits for tea Sunday—Miss Bradbury likes 'em so!"

"Yes, and the rest like 'em more so," assented Bob. "Flour and blueing, mix carefully and take regularly to depress your spirits. All right, Rosie. 'Bye, mother." And Bob departed, leaving Rosie's gaunt shoulders shaking over his exquisite wit.

Monday morning came very quickly. The entire family dreaded the three months which should be spent without Margery, and to no one else in all the world than her girlhood friend did Mrs. Scollard feel that she could have borne to intrust her pretty daughter. She tasted in imagination the loneliness and motherly anxiety which she must feel before she got her back again.

Laura reveled in the opportunity for sentimental melancholy, composing a song entitled "Parting," according to her custom on all family events.

Happie found it hard to see Margery depart; her desire for the outing was swallowed up in the realization that for the first time in their lives she and Margery were to be separated.

The group of stay-at-homes gave Margery many last injunctions as to what she should do on arriving in the Jersey station at which Mrs. Charleford was to meet her, and they watched her skirt around the corner of the car door, and waved their good-byes to her from the platform, where they gathered to wave at her in the car window, until the train was lost to sight around the curve.

Then, true to their principles, Bob and Happie shook off their depression and bestirred themselves.

"Got to haul hay to-day," drawled Bob, in accurate mimicry of Jake Shale's twang. "If you want to git that there hay in, Miss Bradbury, you'd might as well come along, fer they hain't much time these June days, 'n' the sun's hot."

"I was taught there was more time in June days than in any others, Mr. Shale," said Miss Bradbury, while his mother laughed in response to Bob's effort to cheer her. "However, I'm ready to go home if you're ready to drive me."

Happie and Laura walked home from the village, and Laura hummed her latest song, "Parting," as they walked, such a dismal air that Happie was not equal to sustained conversation to such an accompaniment.

At the Neumann gate Happie paused. "I see Gretta out there hanging up her clothes," she said. "I'm going to ask her if she can't steal off this afternoon when we are haying. We'll make a jollification of it. You can go on, Laura; I'll come in a few minutes; no one would dare linger at the Neumanns' on a Monday morning."

Happie ran over the grass and seized Gretta's shoulders, herself unseen. Gretta screamed and then hailed Happie joyfully.

"My, but you scared me!" she cried. "Margery gone?"

Happie nodded. "And I want you to come up this afternoon and get in hay with us—we want to make it a frolic, and beside, you really do know how to load a wagon as well as any farmer, so Rosie says. But it's not for work I want you; you know that. Come over, Gretta, and help us be merry, for I'm afraid we miss Margery."

"I guess," assented Gretta. "I'll come, if I can get my clothes in, and folded to iron in the morning. And now Margery's gone I want to tell you that I know how you stayed here and let her go in your place—Rosie Gruber told us. You said you'd stay here, even if you got a chance to go, but I couldn't believe it. Still, I know how bad you wanted to go, so I guess I was half way right, after all. Never mind," she added hastily, as Happie showed symptoms of interrupting her. "That's all right; I don't blame you. All I wanted to try and tell you was that I guess you haven't an idea of how glad I am you stayed. I don't seem to know how to say it, so I haven't let you know how much good you're doing me. If it's any comfort to you, you can be sure of one thing—I'd have been miserable if you'd gone. I didn't know the difference you were making, not rightly know it, till I heard from Rosie that I might have lost you. It took my breath away. You like to make folks happy, so don't be sorry you let Margery go, Happie dear."

Happie had never before heard a speech of one third this length from Gretta; she saw that the girl was trying to break through her reticence to comfort her for the regret which she fancied Happie must feel.

"Why, you dear Gretta!" she cried. "I do know you need me, and I do see you're happier and more girlish since I found you—found you in the paint pot, like 'the little husband no bigger than my thumb' of Mother Goose fame. You are quite, quite wrong if you think I am sorry that I could not go instead of Margery. At first I did want to go; that's true, not because I don't like Crestville, but because any girl would jump at such a chance as that—at first. But I'm delighted that it's Margery and not I, who is on the train, and I'm glad for my own sake, not for hers alone. So be satisfied that I am satisfied, and come over to help us be happy in this lovely country life."

"I'll come—unless I can't," said Gretta, and Happie ran homeward after Laura.

By three o'clock Gretta's fresh starched pink sunbonnet appeared down the road, bobbing up and down under the trees. The Scollards were all out in the field with Ralph, all save Happie, who had come in to watch for Gretta and to take her out with her. But Gretta did not seem to know that she was shy; her foot was on her native heath, she carried her own pitchfork, and in hay-making it was not she, but the city children who were at a disadvantage.

"You'd better let me load," she said, nodding at Peter Kuntz who had taken Jake Shale's place that afternoon. It always surprised the inmates of the Ark that there was, apparently, no inequality of age in Crestville. Everybody knew everybody else with the intimacy of first names and identical ages, even if one were eight and the other eighty.

"Glad to git you to load, Gretta," responded Pete heartily. And Gretta swung herself up on the back of the hay wagon, taking her stand on the thin layer of hay already scattered over its floor, resting on her pitchfork like a youthful Bellona.

"Now, Laura, you and Polly get out with Penny, and leave—let—Happie and Ralph help me load. Bob will help Pete toss, and when we've loaded, you can all get up and ride in. We might stick somebody with the fork if there were too many on while we were loading," said Gretta, taking command of the work in the wagon like the experienced young farmer that she was. "You don't need a fork, Happie; it's just as well you haven't an extra one; you're not used to handling such things. You scatter with your hands, and I'll take the hay as Pete and Bob throw it up. You watch a minute, and you'll see what to do."

Laura obeyed Gretta reluctantly, and Happie began to think that the prettiest motions were not taught young girls, nor executed by them in calisthenic or dancing classes. Gretta made a picture as she stood, her handsome face flushing under her rose-colored sunbonnet, her dark eyes bright with concentrated attention, and proud pleasure in performing her task as well as any boy could have done. Her sleeves were turned back to her elbows, her brown arms were well-shaped, her tall figure splendidly proportioned, and strong with the strength of trained muscles and a life spent in the sunshine and pure air. She caught the great bunches of hay which Pete and Bob threw up to her, wielding her fork surely and gracefully, judging accurately and quickly where to place each forkful to keep the load symmetrical and the balance true so that when the last wisp was on, the great wagon would roll down the hilly meadow, down into the barn, with no danger to itself, nor to its riders.

It was so fascinating to watch Gretta's movements, to stand among the delicious hay in the June sunshine, that Happie forgot to work, drinking in a new experience that seemed to her the most delightful she had ever tasted.

The laden wagon was piled higher rapidly. Bob and Pete pitched fast, trying to tire Gretta, but she received as fast as they pitched, and it was Ralph who first cried for mercy.

"Look here, do you think we're hoppers?" he asked pantingly.

"Yes, grasshoppers," said Bob, throwing a particularly large bunch of the fragrant timothy at his friend. But he stopped himself, and wiped his brow, leaving on it a design sketched in timothy seed. "Talk about gymnasium practice!" he gasped. "There isn't a girl in one of the gyms, I believe, who could hold out at this work the way you have, Gretta. I take off my hat to you; you have beaten me." And Bob made a deep bow, sweeping the ground with the flapping hat which he wore like other farmers.

To Happie's surprise Gretta returned the bow with an equally low one, brushing the hay with her gingham skirt spread out in each hand. Her face dimpled with a mischievousness new in her.

"Every jack has a trade," she said. "I ought to beat you at hay-making; maybe you would beat me if we were loading up on Latin. You might hand up Penny now, Bob, and then Polly. I don't believe I'd use the fork for them. This wagon won't hold more than half a dozen more forkfuls, Pete."

"All right, Gretta; that's all right," said Pete. "You know when you've got enough."

"I believe you think you know when you've got enough, too, Pete," suggested Bob.

"Well," said Pete, pushing back his hat with the arm that dried his face, and shifting his tobacco into his other cheek, "well, Bob, I've been pitching hay for full—le's see—full forty-seven seasons, and I notice forks keeps gittin' heavier every one of the last ten of 'em."

"Gracious; mine is heavy enough for me now, in my first season!" exclaimed Bob. "Come up, Pennykins; Gretta's ready for the last of her load now."

He swung Penny up to the strong arms held out to receive her, followed Penny with Polly, and assisted Laura by vigorous "boosts," and no small effort, for Laura was not a good climber, and the hay afforded but poor foothold. With Happie pulling on one arm, Gretta the other, and Bob shoving from below, dignified Laura was hoisted in a most undignified manner. Ralph slid down to help rake behind the wagon, Pete took up the reins, shouted to his patient beasts, and the wagon started, groaning and protesting under the heavy burden with which Gretta's skillful loading had heaped it.

The field lay upward of the slope of a hill; rocks abounded in it, the loose Pennsylvania rocks, as many and as troublesome as those with which New England struggles. There was a sort of cairn of them heaped at the foot of the slope where the Bittenbenders, or some other predecessors of the present tenants, had deposited the stones which they had picked from the field, intending, on a day which had never come, to haul them away to the rough stone wall which marked the field's northern boundary.

Just as the hay wagon, looking like a moving hillock itself, reached this high mound of rocks, Pete's hand guiding the horses, was thrown up to ward off a branch that threatened his eyes; the horses swerved, the wagon went up on two wheels, and the sudden motion sent Polly from her seat too near the edge, head downward and backward, over the top of the load.

It all happened in an instant. Happie saw Bob throw up his hands with a gesture of horror, saw Polly disappear, and saw Gretta spring up, at the same time throwing herself face downward on the hay. Happie saw her catch one of Polly's ankles, and hold the child with her strong hand, suspended over the wagon. Pete jerked the reins sharply, the wagon righted itself, and Gretta's other hand crept cautiously after its mate, taking Polly's other ankle in its grasp. Then Happie aroused from the paralysis of mind that seemed to have fallen upon her. She crawled to the side of the wagon, and together she and Gretta drew Polly into safety.

It seemed an hour since she had seen the child lurch backward and fall—it had been seconds. She looked down. There stood Pete, blue under the tan of his skin. Bob and Ralph, one with hands upraised, the other crouched as if to dodge the sorrow, stood like statues, ashen gray. As Happie looked down, Bob moved, and turned away to hide the tears that streamed down his face. Pete gathered together the reins, shaking from head to foot. Ralph covered his face with his hands, and Happie heard him breathe: "Thank God!"

"She'll never be no nearer the aidge of eternity till she goes over it," remarked Pete. "Git ap, Jim! Come on, Lil!"

Polly lay hiding her face on Gretta's lap, who smoothed her hair silently, her own face grave and pale. Penny was crying with all her might, and Laura rocked her body to and fro, moaning hysterically: "Oh, those rocks! Those rocks!"

Happie looked down at the pile for which Polly had headed. It was hardly possible that she could have struck them, backward as she was falling, and not have broken her neck. A sickening realization of the sorrow so narrowly escaped, was followed by a swift rush of love and gratitude for the strong, quiet girl, whose quick brain and steady hand had saved Polly.

Happie turned to Gretta with her whole heart in her face.

"It was death," she whispered; she could not summon her voice. "I can never thank you."

"I only held her up," said Gretta.

Then the color rushed up over her blanched face in a wave of joy.

"I'm glad if I can pay some of my debt," she said.

The great wagon, so heavily laden with its towering hay and grateful hearts, rolled slowly down the road. Thanks to Gretta, it was still carrying only glad young folk on a hay ride. But how nearly it had been dear little Polly's funeral car!

[CHAPTER XII]
LAURA'S PHILANTHROPY

"I wish you and Gretta had not forgotten my pup," said Miss Bradbury coming into the dining-room the morning after the departure of Margery. "I still hear queer noises at night. I'm going to send down to town for a good dog. Jake Shale has offered me a beagle, and Peter Kuntz assures me the one thing on earth I need is his old dog, half shepherd and seven-eighths cur, but I'm not convinced."

"What a very fractional dog, Miss Keren!" laughed Mrs. Scollard.

"Let me send down to mother to get a dog a friend of mine has, Miss Bradbury," suggested Ralph. "He's about two years old, and thoroughbred, a fine watchdog. They want to get him into the country, or they'd never give him up; he is out of place in New York, they think."

"Everything is that wants to run and play," agreed Miss Bradbury. "Two-legged or four. What sort of dog is this one?"

"A beauty collie," said Ralph. "I'm sure he can be had for the asking. His owners won't sell him, because they want to be sure of the sort of hands he falls into. I'll write Snigs to go ask for him, if you'll take him."

"I'll take him," said Miss Bradbury. "Tell Snigs to come up in time for the Fourth, and bring him."

Ralph colored with pleasure. "Thanks, Miss Bradbury; you're awfully good. Snigs would be delighted to come."

"And we to have him!" cried Happie. "You really are good, Aunt Keren!"

"At least that's better than being awful, as Ralph accuses me of being. Though you do seem to feel it necessary to affirm my goodness, which is not complimentary," said Miss Bradbury. "I shall be obliged to Snigs if he can get the dog; I don't intend to hear noises dogless any longer."

"I wish, Laura, you'd come fix my torn buttonhole," said Polly from the doorway. "Happie's going to do Margery's work and her own too, and I can't keep my skirt fastened."

"Indeed I can't," said Laura, leaving the room before her mother could interfere to stop her. "I've got to go out."

Far away as Laura had always been from practical, every-day matters, of late she had been miles above the heads of her family, "soaring down the milky way," Bob said, "when there were milk pails down below needing scalding." Bob had scant patience with Laura's nonsense at any time, and he was working rather hard that summer.

It was trying; for at neither work nor play was Laura any use. She had a secret. What it was nobody knew—which was not strange, considering that it is the nature of secrets not to be known—but nobody could conjecture what it was.

If her mother and Miss Keren has guessed, it is highly probable that they would have interfered with her plan, but Laura, intent on proving to the world, and to her own family in particular, her entire competence to succeed in whatever she undertook, kept her own counsel and went her mysterious way.

Up on the edge of the extreme boundary of Crestville stood a little chapel served by a well-meaning, but illiterate young "preacher," as they called him in the village. He it was whom Laura had selected as the instrument of her plan, and to it the young man lent himself with an enthusiasm most refreshing to a lady of scarce thirteen, accustomed to the ridicule of a large and unappreciative home circle.

It was an extraordinary plan for a little girl to have laid, but then Laura never did anything that one would expect from a girl of her age, and she had sufficient self-confidence to have equipped an Arctic exploring party.

The first requisite for her scheme was a place, a setting, and Laura pitched upon the little church on the edge of the woods as the best for her purpose.

So one day she had attired herself in her most becoming muslin, took a book under her arm, and a roll of music in her hand—not that she needed them, but for dramatic effect—and sallied forth to win the young preacher to her way of thinking.

He lived not far from his church; when Laura knocked at the door his girl-wife opened it with her right hand, holding her baby in the hollow of that arm, while the left hand held a yellow bowl full of potatoes which she had just fetched from the cellar.

"See Mr. Buck?" she repeated after Laura, but with a strong Pennsylvania Dutch accent that rendered the name "Book." "Yes, I guess. He's in the room. You go in through if you want. Wait a little; I'll call him."

She disappeared, leaving Laura standing just across the threshold, and returned followed by a young man with beady black eyes, who looked as if he could not have been more than twenty-two years old.

He greeted Laura with respect most cheering to her soul, and invited her into "the room," which the little girl had already learned was short for "the best room," or "the sitting-room."

Laura placed herself with much dignity upon the figured lounge, which was arrayed in the brightest shades of all colors, deposited her roll and book beside her, crossed her feet, folded her hands and began with the utmost self-possession to unfold her errand. "Mr. Buck," she said. "I am the daughter of Mrs. Scollard, the lady from New York who is staying with her friend who owns the Bittenbender place."

"Yes, I know," said Mr. Buck. "I have seen you and your sisters and brothers already; we look in when we go by, my wife and I. You have it good there yet."

"Oh, we don't like it!" returned Laura with a toss of her head. "It is better than it was, though. I came to talk to you about a plan I have for entertaining the people of the—the people all around here who want to improve themselves. I thought I would give an entertainment on the Fourth of July, and invite everybody; just let everybody know they can come if they want to."

"Free?" inquired the young preacher, as Laura paused for an instant for breath.

"Oh, of course!" exclaimed Laura impatiently. "You know there isn't anything here to improve people; you don't have any lectures, nor music, nor pictures, nor anything at all. I am—well, you see I write music and poetry, and I play and sing, and I want to do something for these poor people. I want to give an entertainment on the Fourth of July, and I want you to help me. Will you?"

"What a good girl you must be, and ain't you smart!" exclaimed the young man admiringly.

He was very simple, and it never occurred to him to question the ability of this girl who spoke so beautifully, and was so very easy in her manners, to do exactly what she said she could do, and he was honestly grateful for her desire to do something for his flock. "What should I do?" he asked. "Should I speak for you? I might make a speech after your songs; should I? I guess that would go good."

"No, I don't think so," said Laura positively. Then, seeing the disappointment in the young man's face, and not being without tact when she had an end in view, she added: "In entertainments they don't have speeches; not in this kind of entertainment. What I want to do is improve people, don't you see?"

Laura herself did not see the suggestion latent in her remark that Mr. Buck's speech might not be improving. Nor did he, for he accepted her decision meekly, and asked: "What then should I do?"

"You can let me give the entertainment in your chapel, please," said Laura grandly. "And you can let me come here to practice every day, so they won't know at home that we are going to have this entertainment. You won't tell any one till just before the Fourth, will you?"

"No," said the little preacher. Then looking puzzled he inquired: "Don't they know at your house what you're doing? Ain't they going to help you yet?"

"No, indeed," cried Laura. "If they did I could give—no, I couldn't give the entertainment at home, because there wouldn't be room for all the people who would come, but I could practice at home. It is to be a secret, so I want you, please, to let me practice on the organ, or whatever you have in the church——"

"It's an organ," interrupted the little preacher, looking hurt for the first time. "The ladies of my congregation bought it saving up egg money and doing washing for city boarders one summer. It cost thirty dollars; it's a regular parlor organ, a good one. It sounds 'most so good as a big organ; wait till you hear it once!"

"Yes," said Laura, a trifle impatiently, for she was not interested in the organ, except as it served her end. "I'm glad it is a good one. I'd like to practice every day till the Fourth, and I came up to ask you if you didn't think my plan a beautiful one, and if you wouldn't be kind enough to help me? I knew that a minister would want to do anything he could to improve people, and to make them happy," she added artfully.

"Of course," assented Mr. Buck heartily. "I'll give you the key to the church, and you can practice all the days you want. And you can give the entertainment here. You must be smart if you can do it all alone, and sing, and make up poetry yet! And you are a kind young lady to want to amuse folks."

Laura tried to look modest, but succeeded only in dropping her eyes in the semblance of modesty; in her heart she felt that this praise was merited.

She arose to go with what she felt sure was a graceful, dignified and entirely grown-up manner.

"HE FOLLOWED LAURA TO THE FRONT DOOR"

"Oh," she said, "I am glad to give the poor people a chance to hear good music. And I am not smart to make up music and poetry; it is a talent of mine, that's all. Good-bye, Mr. Buck. Thank you for helping me, but of course I knew you would want to."

She gathered up the music and book which she had carried with a vague intention of letting them prove her claim to music and poetry, and extended her hand with the air of an empress as she moved towards the door.

The honest little preacher grasped the hand heartily. "Good-bye," he said. "I am obliged to you for letting me help you out."

He followed Laura to the front door where he halted as a thought struck him.

"Will it be funny, your show on the Fourth?" he asked. "Our folks like funny things. Shall they laugh at it, say not?"

"Dear me, no," cried Laura, sincerely shocked. "They must learn to like something higher than funny things! Funny things are not improving."

Which statement proved how much she knew of human nature.

The little preacher looked wistful. "They gets pretty tired," he said doubtfully. "It's hard work farming, and these fields are stony yet! In my county we don't have to pick stones three days before we can plough one day."

Laura smiled in a superior way, and turned to go. "I shouldn't feel like doing funny things, Mr. Buck," she said. "Good music is the saddest thing! And all my poetry is very deep." With which statement she went out of the little gate.