rummy thumbnail

rummy thumbnail Register +128K “Please,” answered the discomfited youth, “I aint never seen a ship of no kind.”,Saw when you work in the back woodshed.”,He looked at the beaming faces, at the beautiful table with Jean’s great pagoda cake in the centre, the dates, 1893-1906, in evergreen; at the flowers everywhere; at the dishes,—they usually ate from vine leaves at their out-of-door feasts,—at the paper napkins folded fantastically and hovering over the table like gay butterflies. His eloquent face told his surprise, his gratitude, his delight. He opened his mouth to speak some fitting word, but it wouldn’t come. He tried again, for he felt the occasion called for something formally appreciative. But only a whimsical idea flitted into his mind; and he sang back—,It had stopped raining, but was still cloudy. This was the hour when Billy usually wheeled long miles by himself, dreaming dreams no one but a boy knows how to dream. Nothing short of a downpour ever hindered him; thus mother and sister knew it was genuine self-sacrifice that kept him beside the little girl through the long afternoon.,“Whoa, Josh! Whoa, Jake!” he roared, apparently exerting himself to the utmost to hold in the skittish pair, but in reality giving a few practised touches on the reins which defeated his commands.，Moses and Betty were left to mind house, the admonishings of Mrs. Wopp being seasoned with picturesque if carelessly applied texts. The envious might hurl hisses, but Moses and Betty were invulnerable to all such assaults upon their anticipations of the day’s freedom with its already planned joys.，“I’ll mow in the morning. Let me stay and visit Pretty—Harold, I mean—till sundown; can’t I, mamma?” He patted her cheek with a vigor that made her wink. “You know you can’t refuse your darling boy,” he wheedled.，CHAPTER III THE SURPRISEBut a different and sudden fear leaped in both hearts as they rounded the shoulder of the mountain. The air had rapidly grown more oppressive; now they knew the cause, the forest was on fire!

“I guess Nancy’s got tired wartchin’ fer the gopher to come out,” remarked Betty, presently. “She’s left her job an’ gone away. P’raps she thinks she can git a mouse in the barn easier.”,The pictures that followed were of fairies and sprites irresistible to childish minds.,“You carnt spell so smart anyways,” he ventured. Betty turned her piquant nose up at him and suddenly bounced up from the table.,“Please, Mister, my nose was bleedin’ an’ I lorst my way lookin’ fer warter, an’ here I am on Jording’s stormy banks.”,“As the door creaketh on his hinges, so the slugger turneth on his bed.” Liza Wopp’s voice was compelling in its significance. Through the rose-lit dreams of Moses, the sound and the awful words were like the threatenings of an approaching storm.,CHAPTER V.—A DANCE IN THE CEDAR HILLS.,“Ay, ay, sir,” came this time from two boys who had charge of some logs lashed together and crossed and recrossed by a hash-like lot of refuse lumber, and moored with a dog chain.,“Why, Betty?”,All but May Nell; when Edith and Mrs. Bennett rubbed and warmed her she declared she didn’t need it, and was so absorbed in lamenting the loss of the Fair Ellen, she could think of nothing else.,Had he but dreamed on for an hour or so he would have returned, rested, refreshed, the cheery boy that helped to make the Bennett house a home. But a voice in the road above startled him. Only a word was spoken, a greeting; but it was surly and foreign, Italian.,“Moses, ef you hev finished yer supper, change yer good clothes an’ go git the cows,” directed his mother. “Betty run an’ fasten up the hens, else the coyotes’ll git them.”,She emerged from the house her hair coiled on the top of her head and decorated with a strip of shining silver from an empty biscuit tin. Thus had she seen a circus lady dressed on one never-to-be-forgotten day. Around her small body was draped a yellow silk shawl of Mrs. Wopps. Her feet were encased in a pair of Ebenezer Wopp’s reddest socks, bound on by bright green ribbon ripped from her winter hat. From her fair hair floated a white aigret made of chicken feathers hastily wired together. Moses needed no aigret as a strand of red hair stood upright from the crown of his head..