Kit of Greenacre Farm | Page 6

an
encouraging report. The back of the house was badly damaged, but the
main building stood intact, though the charred clapboards and wide
vacant windows looked desolate enough.
"Thank goodness the wind was from the south, and blew the flames
away from the pines," said Kit, dropping into her chair, hungrily.
"Doesn't it seem good to get some of Cousin Roxy's huckleberry
pancakes again, girls? Oh yes, we met my prisoner--I should say, my
erstwhile prisoner--on the road. He was tapping chestnut trees over on
Peck's Hill like a woodpecker. You needn't laugh, Doris, 'cause Billie
saw him too, didn't you, Bill? And he's got a sweet forgiving nature. He
doffed his hat to me and I smiled back just as though I'd never caught
him in our berry patch, and had Shad lock him up in the corn-crib."

"Was he heading this way?" the Judge asked. "I want him to look at my
peach trees and tell me what in tunket ails them."
"Why, Judge, I'm surprised at you, and before the children, too."
Cousin Roxy's eyes twinkled with mirth at having caught the Judge in a
lapse.
"I only said tunket, Roxy," he began, but Cousin Roxy cut him short.
"Tunket's been good Connecticut for Tophet ever since I was knee high
to a toadstool, and we won't say anything more about that. Jerry will be
glad to go up with you to the peach orchard, and you can take the
youngsters with you. I want Jean and Kit to drive over with us and help
fix Maple Lawn."
But before a week was out, all of the carefully laid plans for housing
the "robins" before snow fell were knocked higher than a kite. Kit said
that one of the most delightful things about country life, anyway, was
its uncertainty. You went ahead and laid a lot of plans on the lap of the
Norns, and then the old ladies stood up and scattered everything
helter-skelter. The beauty of it was, though, that they usually turned
around and handed you unexpected gifts so much better than anything
you had hoped for, that you were left without a chance for argument.
The family had taken up its new quarters at Maple Lawn, and two of
the local carpenters, Mr. Peleg Weaver, Philemon's brother, and Mr.
Delaplaine, had been persuaded to devote a portion of their valuable
time to rehabilitating Greenacre Farm. It took tact and persuasion to
induce the aforesaid gentlemen to desert their favorite chairs on the
little stoop in front of Byers' Grocery Store, and approach anything
resembling daily toil. There had been a Squire in the Weaver family
three generations back, and Peleg held firmly to established precedent.
He might be landed gentry, but he was no tiller of the soil, and he
secretly looked down on his elder brother for personally cultivating the
family acres.
Mr. Delaplaine was likewise addicted to reverie and historic retrospect.
Nothing delighted Billie and Kit so much as to ride down to the store

and get a chance to converse with both of the old men on local history
and family "trees." Mr. Delaplaine's mail, which consisted mostly of
catalogues, came addressed to N.B. Delaplaine, Esq., and even the little
French Canadian kiddies tumbling around the gardens of the mill
houses down in Nantic knew what that N.B. stood for, but to Gilead he
was just "Bony" Delaplaine.
Every day that first week found the girls down at the Farm prying
around the ruins for any lost treasures. Stanley Howard struck up a
friendship with both the Judge and Mr. Bobbins, and usually drove by
on his way from the village. He would stop and chat for a few moments
with them, but Kit was elusive. Vaguely, she felt that the proper thing
for her to do was to offer an apology, for even considering him an
unlawful trespasser. When Stanley would drive away, Jean would laugh
at her teasingly.
"Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud, sister mine? He seems a
very sightly young man, even if he does 'chase caterpillars for a living.'
I never did see any one except you, Kit, who hated to acknowledge
herself in the wrong. The rest of us all have the most peaceful,
forgiving sort of dispositions, but you can be a regular porcupine when
you want to be."
"It could come from Uncle Cassius," retorted Kit. "Did you hear them
all talking about him over at Elmwood while we were there? Let's sit
here under the pines a minute until the mailman goes by. I'm awfully
tired poking over cinders. Cousin Roxy said he was the only notable in
our family. Dean Cassius Cato Peabody. We ought to tell 'Bony' that."
"Don't you call him 'Bony' so he'll hear you," whispered