Ethel Mortons Holidays | Page 4

bands.
"These are to tie your eyes with," he explained: "Yellow, you see;
Hallowe'en color. The girls insist on my explaining all their fine points
for fear they won't be appreciated," he said to the doctor.
"Quite right. I never should have thought about the color."
"Mother, this is George Foster," said Helen, welcoming a tall boy who
was not a member of the U. S. C. but who had helped at the Club

entertainment by taking part in the minuet. He shook hands with Mrs.
Morton and Mrs. Smith and then submitted to having his eyes
bandaged. He was followed by Gregory Patton, another high school lad,
and to the great joy of everybody, James, after all, came on his crutches
with Margaret.
"Now, then, my blindfolded friends," said Roger, "Grandfather tells me
that it is the custom in Scotland where fairies and witches are very
abundant, for the ceremony that we are about to perform to open every
Hallowe'en party. He has it direct from Bobby Burns."
"Then it's right," came a smothered voice from beneath James' bandage.
"James is of Scottish descent and he confirms this statement, so we can
go ahead and be perfectly sure that we're doing the correct thing. Of
course, we all want to know the future and particularly whatever we
can about the person we're going to marry, so that's what we're going to
try to find out at the very start off."
"Take off my bandage," cried Dicky. "I know the perthon I'm going to
marry."
A shout of laughter greeted this assertion from the six-year-old.
"Who is it, Dicky?" asked Helen, her arm around his shoulders.
"I'm going to marry Mary," he asserted stoutly.
There was a renewed peal at this, and Roger went on with his
instructions.
"I'll lead you two by two to the kitchen door and then you'll go down
the flight of steps and straight ahead for anywhere from ten to twenty
steps. That will land you right in the middle of what the frost has left of
the Morton garden. When you get there you'll 'pull kale'."
"Meaning?" inquired George Foster.
"Meaning that you'll feel about until you find a stalk of cabbage and

pull it up."
"I don't like cabbage," complained Tom Watkins.
"You'll like this because it will give you a lot of information. If it's long
or short or fat or thin your future husband or wife will correspond to it."
"That's the most unromantic thing I ever heard," exclaimed Margaret
Hancock. "I certainly hope my future husband won't be as fat as a
cabbage!"
"You can tell how great a fortune he's going to have--or she--by the
amount of earth that clings to the stem."
"Watch me pull mine so g-e-n-t-l-y that not a grain of sand slips off,"
said Tom.
"If you've got courage enough to bite the stem you can find out with
perfect accuracy whether your beloved will have a sweet disposition or
the opposite."
"In any case he'd have a disposition like a cabbage," insisted Margaret,
who did not like cabbage any more than Tom did.
"Ready?" Roger marshalled his little army. "Two by two. Doctor and
Ethel Blue, Tom and Dorothy, James and Helen, George and Ethel
Brown, Gregory and Margaret. Come on, Della," and he led the way
through the kitchen where Mary and the cook were hugely entertained
by the procession.
With cries and stumbling they went forth into the cabbage patch, where
they all possessed themselves of stalks which they straightway brought
in to the light of the jack-o'-lanterns to interpret.
"My lady love will be tall and slender--not to say thin," began Dr.
Watkins. "I see no information here as to the color of her hair and eyes.
Fate cruelly witholds these important facts. I regret to say that I wooed
her so vigorously that I shook off any gold-pieces she may have had

clinging about her so I can only be sure of the golden quality of her
character which I have just discovered by biting it."
Amid general laughter they all began to read their fortunes. Tom
announced that his beloved was so thin that she was really a candidate
for the attentions of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals, and that he couldn't find out anything about her character
because there wasn't enough of her to bite.
Margaret had pulled a stalk that fulfilled all her expectations as to size,
for it was so short and fat that she could see no relation between it and
anything human and threw it out of the window in disgust. The rest
found themselves fitted out with a variety of possibilities.
"There doesn't seem to be a real tearing beauty among them all," sighed
Roger. "That's what I'd set my heart on."