Little Miss By-The-Day | Page 6

rear wall was from the throats of some score or more of her expensive great-great-great offspring who lived in the stable in tiny stalls with their pedigree cards tacked neatly under their elaborate kennel names.
It was a cross to Felice that she was not allowed to go through the small arched doorway at the back of the garden that led to the stable that opened on the narrow cobblestone "Tradespersons' Street." The Major didn't approve of the manners of Zeb Smathers the kennel man, or Zeb's wife Marthy, though he knew there wasn't a pair with their patience and skill to be found for miles around. All the same Felice adored the stable yard and would have dearly loved to climb the narrow stairs up to the low-ceilinged rooms above the stables where Marthy liked to sit.
Lean, grizzled old Marthy! There was usually a dog or two in her lap, either a sickly pup or a grieving-eyed mother dog whose babies had been taken away from her. Such tiny creatures, even the mother dogs-- those little Blenheim spaniels! Snub-nosed, round-headed with long silky flopping ears, soft curly coats and feathery tails. Felice liked the yellow and white ones, and always reached for them, but her grandfather coolly "weeded them out," as Zeb expressed it, because the Trenton ideal was a white dog marked with red.
Felicia knew when the dogs were going away. They always went the day after the Basket Man came with a pole tied full of oval gilded wicker hampers. Sometimes she, was allowed to stand in the gateway and watch them have their farewell bath, only of course she sniffed uncomfortably when Zeb let brown drops drip into the rinsing water from a fat bottle with a gay red skull and cross-bones on the label. "Scarbolic" was what she understood it to be, she mustn't touch it or she'd "go dead," whatever that was. But she forgot all about the smell as she watched the fluffy doggies drying in the sunny stable yard while Marthy sang vociferously to cheer her own drooping spirits; the silly old woman never could bear the days the dogs went away.
And so Felice on her side of the gate could listen rapturously to the throaty drone in which Marthy asked the world
"What's this dull town to me? Rob-in's not here--"
or warbled heavily
"Churry Ripe, Churry Ripe, Who'll buy my churries--"
or wailed
"Where have you been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy? Where have you been, charming Billy?"
It almost made up for not being allowed to go out of the garden.
If Felice only could have been allowed to go around into the Tradespersons' Street just once! I wish she could have gone--just once! On one of the days when the swinging sign, that was gilded and painted so beautifully, was hung outside to announce
"KING CHARLES AND BLENHEIM SPANIELS For sale within."
I'm sure she would have loved the line of carriages waiting in the cobble-stoned alley when the fine ladies came to buy. I think she would have clapped her hands at the gay boxes of geraniums and the crisp white curtains in Marthy's shining windows over the stable door.
But she could only stay in the garden with the thin visaged old French woman who taught her to read and to write and to embroider and to play upon an old lute and to curtsy and to dance. One thing she learned that the French woman did not teach her--to whistle! She remembers answering the sea-gulls who mewed outside in the harbor and the sparrows who twittered in the ivy and the tiny pair of love-birds who dwelt in a cage at her mother's bedroom window. She learned to whistle without distorting her lips because her grandfather had forbidden her to whistle and if she held her mouth almost normal he couldn't tell when he looked out into the garden whether it was Felice or the birds who were twittering.
Her first memories of her mother were extremely vague. She remembers she was pretty and smiling and that most of the time she lay in a "sleighback" bed and that in the morning she would say,
"Go out into the garden and be happy," and that at twilight she would say, "You look as though you had been very happy in the garden--"
Sometimes Maman wasn't awake when Felicia came in from her long day in the garden. And the little girl always knew if her mother's door were closed that she must tiptoe softly so as not to disturb her. There was a reward for being quiet. In the niche of the stairway Felice would find a good-night gift--sometimes a cooky in a small basket or an apple or a flower,--something to make a little girl smile even if her mother was too tired or too ill to say good-night.