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“Yes, go away, Billy; I’m not afraid.” May Nell laughed happily. Her quick mind was delighted with the masquerading. While Betty had been busy in the garden her pet turkey, Job, who depended on his little mistress to feed him, became very hungry. Job suffered under great disadvantages. His general one-sided condition, caused by his partial blindness, rendered him incapable of picking up the various dainties on which his brethren fattened. It must be confessed that the fondest and most partial vision could not overlook Job’s undoubted scrawniness. Indeed, had he not received individual attention from the deeply sympathetic Betty, there is every reason to believe that his career would have been shortened by that inexorable law which, in those forms of life termed the lower, decrees the extinction of the weak. All were silent for a little. Most of them had been more than once to San Francisco’s celebrated dealer in sweets..
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kez_ h (Kez_h)
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"Well, yes, so far as my memory serves me, I think she was."I tried logging in using my phone number and I
was supposed to get a verification code text,but didn't
get it. I clicked resend a couple time, tried the "call
me instead" option twice but didn't get a call
either. the trouble shooting had no info on if the call
me instead fails.There was
Some days are like tin nutmeg-graters that everybody uses to grate you against, and this was one for me. For an hour I sat and grated my own self against Alfred's letter that had come in the morning. I realised that I would just have to come to some sort of decision about what I was going to do, for he wrote that he was coming in a week or two.
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Conrad
If he was more thoughtful, quiet, at home, his hours of play were more keenly enjoyed as they grew daily fewer. He had found a “dandy job” that would not take him away from home; he could still mow the lawn, and do the chores. He was glad now that he had learned various parts of the housework, for he was to be janitor and messenger at one of the banks, a fact to be told his mother as a surprise on the last day of school. The Wopp parlor was seldom entered, except on very special occasions or when Mrs. Wopp with formality and no undue haste dusted the furniture. The room had an air of solemnity and gloom, absent in the cheerful dining-room where the family usually sat. A homemade rag carpet covered the floor. Six slippery, horsehair chairs, one of them a rocker, and a horsehair couch, which did not invite confidence, were ranged stiffly around the sides of the room. In one corner was an ancient organ, wheezy and querulous with neglect, and in another stood a lofty what-not, on whose numerous shelves were deposited the family treasures. Here, was a woolly lamb at one time beloved of Moses; there his tin savings bank. Stiffly upright stood Betty’s wax doll Hannah, seldom played with and then only for a few minutes at a time. Mrs. Wopp was represented by a few shell boxes and a match box of china flanked by a sleek china cat. “Last night I heard something on the Q. T. I didn’t mean to, but I’m glad I did. I was in the pantry chuckin’ some bread an’ butter under my solar plexus when I heard Mr. Wright tell sister in the sitting-room—I guess some door was open a crack—that his law business was growing a little. I didn’t hear the next words, but there was ‘please’ in italics in his voice. But sister said, an’ I heard her plain enough, ‘No, Hal, not till I’ve saved enough to take Billy through school.’ ‘I’ll help—’ Mr. Wright got as far as that when this guy waked up,—knew he’d snuck information not intended for him. So I made a noise; I scatted the cat—no cat there—slammed the door, and kicked up a racket generally so’s they’d know I was there.” Rational people laughed at these stories, declared them the fancies of brains fuddled by too long a stay at the saloons in town. But Billy was not so easily satisfied. He wished to see for himself those shadowy forms; to prove to the small, scared children that, contrary to general belief, the brothers sometimes had guests. And he had a queer feeling that some way the house would have a place in his life. He admired its gloomy grandeur; planned the additions he would make if it were his own, and the gardens, the hedges of roses, and banks of fragrant smilax, that should grow there..
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