The Little Colonels House Party | Page 7

guarded them like a little dragon. They were the only things she owned that the children were not allowed to touch. Even Davy, when he was permitted to look at the wonderful pictures in her "Arabian Nights," or "Pilgrim's Progress," or "Mother Goose," had to sit with his hands behind his back while she carefully turned the leaves. Besides these three, there was "Alice in Wonderland," and "?sop's Fables," there was "Robinson Crusoe," and "Little Women," and two volumes of fairy tales in green and gold with a gorgeous peacock on the cover. Eugene Field's poems had come in the last box, with Riley's "Songs of Childhood" and Kipling's jungle tales. Twelve beautiful books, all of Mrs. Sherman's giving, and they were like twelve great windows to Betty, opening into a new strange world, far away from the experiences of her every-day life.
She had read them over and over so many times that she always knew what was coming next, even before she turned the page; and she had read them to the other children so many times that they, too, knew them almost by heart.
The little dog-eared books in the meeting-house proved poor reading sometimes after such entertainment. So many of them were about unnaturally good children who never did wrong, and unnaturally bad children who never did right. At the end there was always the word MORAL, in big capital letters, as if the readers were supposed to be too blind to find it for themselves, and it had to be put directly across the path for them to stumble over.
Betty laughed at them sometimes, but she touched the little books with reverent fingers, when she remembered how old they were, and how long ago their first childish readers laid them aside. The hands that had held them first had years before grown tired and wrinkled and old, and had been lying for a generation under the myrtle and lilies of the churchyard outside.
Many an afternoon she had spent, perched in the high window, with her feet drawn up under her on the sill, reading aloud to Davy, who lay outside on the grass, staring up at the sky. Davy's short fat legs could not climb from the board to the window-sill, and since this little Mahomet could not come to the mountain, Betty had to carry the mountain to him.
The reading was slow work sometimes. Davy's mind, like his legs, could not climb as far as Betty's, and she usually had to stop at the bottom of every page to explain something. Often he fell asleep in the middle of the most interesting part, and then Betty read on to herself, with nothing to break the stillness around her but the buzzing of the wasps, as they darted angrily in and out of the open window above her head.
To-day Betty had read nearly an hour, and Davy's eyelids were beginning to flutter drowsily, when they heard the slow thud of a horse's hoofs in the thick dust of the road. Betty stopped reading to listen, and Davy sat up to look.
"It's Jake," he announced, recognising the boy who had helped his father with the ploughing.
"Hope he won't see us," said Betty, in a low tone, drawing in her head. "We are not hurting anything, but maybe some of the church people wouldn't like it, if they knew I climbed in at the window. They might think it wasn't respectful."
"He's looking this way," said Davy, who had stood up for a better view, but squatted down again at Betty's command.
[Illustration: "OH, RUN AND GET IT, QUICK, DAVY,' SHE CRIED."]
It was too late. Jake had recognised Davy's shock of yellow hair, and called out, good-naturedly, "Hello, stickin'-plaster, where's Betty? Somewhere around here, I'll bet anything, or you wouldn't be here. I've got a letter for her."
At that, Betty leaned so far out of the window that she nearly lost her balance and toppled over. "Oh, run and get it, quick, Davy," she cried. The little bare feet twinkled through the grass to meet the old sorrel horse, and two brown hands were held up to receive the letter; but Jake preferred to deliver the important document himself.
"Here you are," he said, riding alongside the window and dropping the letter into her eager hands.
"Oh, thank you, Jake," she cried. "It makes me feel as if Christmas was coming. I never got a letter in my life except in my Christmas boxes. My godmother always writes to me then, and this must be from her, too. Yes, it is, I know her handwriting."
If Jake expected her to tear it open instantly and share the news with him before she had examined every inch of the big square envelope, he was disappointed. The old blaze-faced sorrel had carried him out of sight