UNDERSTOOD BETSY

BY DOROTHY CANFIELD
Author of “The Bent Twig,” etc.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY
ADA C. WILLIAMSON

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

• [Uncle Henry looked at her, eyeing her sidewise over the top of one spectacle-glass] [Frontispiece]
• [Elizabeth Ann stood up before the doctor.]
• [“Do you know,” said Aunt Abigail, “I think it’s going to be real nice, having a little girl in the house again”]
• [She had greatly enjoyed doing her own hair.]
• [“Oh, he’s asking for more!” cried Elizabeth Ann]
• [Betsy shut her teeth together hard, and started across]
• [“What’s the matter, Molly? What’s the matter?”]
• [Betsy and Ellen and the old doll]
• [He had fallen asleep with his head on his arms]
• [Never were dishes washed better!]
• [Betsy was staring down at her shoes, biting her lips and winking her eyes]

CHAPTER I
AUNT HARRIET HAS A COUGH

When this story begins, Elizabeth Ann, who is the heroine of it, was a little girl of nine, who lived with her Great-aunt Harriet in a medium-sized city in a medium-sized State in the middle of this country; and that’s all you need to know about the place, for it’s not the important thing in the story; and anyhow you know all about it because it was probably very much like the place you live in yourself.

Elizabeth Ann’s Great-aunt Harriet was a widow who was not very rich or very poor, and she had one daughter, Frances, who gave piano lessons to little girls. They kept a “girl” whose name was Grace and who had asthma dreadfully and wasn’t very much of a “girl” at all, being nearer fifty than forty. Aunt Harriet, who was very tender-hearted, kept her chiefly because she couldn’t get any other place on account of her coughing so you could hear her all over the house.

So now you know the names of all the household. And this is how they looked: Aunt Harriet was very small and thin and old, Grace was very small and thin and middle-aged, Aunt Frances (for Elizabeth Ann called her “Aunt,” although she was really, of course, a first-cousin-once-removed) was small and thin and if the light wasn’t too strong might be called young, and Elizabeth Ann was very small and thin and little. And yet they all had plenty to eat. I wonder what was the matter with them?

It was certainly not because they were not good, for no womenkind in all the world had kinder hearts than they. You have heard how Aunt Harriet kept Grace (in spite of the fact that she was a very depressing person) on account of her asthma; and when Elizabeth Ann’s father and mother both died when she was a baby, although there were many other cousins and uncles and aunts in the family, these two women fairly rushed upon the little baby-orphan, taking her home and surrounding her henceforth with the most loving devotion.

They had said to themselves that it was their manifest duty to save the dear little thing from the other relatives, who had no idea about how to bring up a sensitive, impressionable child, and they were sure, from the way Elizabeth Ann looked at six months, that she was going to be a sensitive, impressionable child. It is possible also that they were a little bored with their empty life in their rather forlorn, little brick house in the medium-sized city, and that they welcomed the occupation and new interests which a child would bring in.

But they thought that they chiefly desired to save dear Edward’s child from the other kin, especially from the Putney cousins, who had written down from their Vermont farm that they would be glad to take the little girl into their family. But “anything but the Putneys!” said Aunt Harriet, a great many times. They were related only by marriage to her, and she had her own opinion of them as a stiffnecked, cold-hearted, undemonstrative, and hard set of New Englanders. “I boarded near them one summer when you were a baby, Frances, and I shall never forget the way they were treating some children visiting there! ... Oh, no, I don’t mean they abused them or beat them ... but such lack of sympathy, such perfect indifference to the sacred sensitiveness of child-life, such a starving of the child-heart ... No, I shall never forget it! They had chores to do ... as though they had been hired men!”

Aunt Harriet never meant to say any of this when Elizabeth Ann could hear, but the little girl’s ears were as sharp as little girls’ ears always are, and long before she was nine she knew all about the opinion Aunt Harriet had of the Putneys. She did not know, to be sure, what “chores” were, but she took it confidently from Aunt Harriet’s voice that they were something very, very dreadful.

There was certainly neither coldness nor hardness in the way Aunt Harriet and Aunt Frances treated Elizabeth Ann. They had really given themselves up to the new responsibility, especially Aunt Frances, who was very conscientious about everything. As soon as the baby came there to live, Aunt Frances stopped reading novels and magazines, and re-read one book after another which told her how to bring up children. And she joined a Mothers’ Club which met once a week. And she took a correspondence course in mothercraft from a school in Chicago which teaches that business by mail. So you can see that by the time Elizabeth Ann was nine years old Aunt Frances must have known all that anybody can know about how to bring up children. And Elizabeth Ann got the benefit of it all.

She and her Aunt Frances were simply inseparable. Aunt Frances shared in all Elizabeth Ann’s doings and even in all her thoughts. She was especially anxious to share all the little girl’s thoughts, because she felt that the trouble with most children is that they are not understood, and she was determined that she would thoroughly understand Elizabeth Ann down to the bottom of her little mind. Aunt Frances (down in the bottom of her own mind) thought that her mother had never really understood her, and she meant to do better by Elizabeth Ann. She also loved the little girl with all her heart, and longed, above everything in the world, to protect her from all harm and to keep her happy and strong and well.

And yet Elizabeth Ann was neither very strong nor well. And as to her being happy, you can judge for yourself when you have read all this story. She was very small for her age, with a rather pale face and big dark eyes which had in them a frightened, wistful expression that went to Aunt Frances’s tender heart and made her ache to take care of Elizabeth Ann better and better.

Aunt Frances was afraid of a great many things herself, and she knew how to sympathize with timidity. She was always quick to reassure the little girl with all her might and main whenever there was anything to fear. When they were out walking (Aunt Frances took her out for a walk up one block and down another every single day, no matter how tired the music lessons had made her), the aunt’s eyes were always on the alert to avoid anything which might frighten Elizabeth Ann. If a big dog trotted by, Aunt Frances always said, hastily: “There, there, dear! That’s a nice doggie, I’m sure. I don’t believe he ever bites little girls. ... mercy! Elizabeth Ann, don’t go near him! ... Here, darling, just get on the other side of Aunt Frances if he scares you so” (by that time Elizabeth Ann was always pretty well scared), “and perhaps we’d better just turn this corner and walk in the other direction.” If by any chance the dog went in that direction too, Aunt Frances became a prodigy of valiant protection, putting the shivering little girl behind her, threatening the animal with her umbrella, and saying in a trembling voice, “Go away, sir! Go away!”

Or if it thundered and lightened, Aunt Frances always dropped everything she might be doing and held Elizabeth Ann tightly in her arms until it was all over. And at night—Elizabeth Ann did not sleep very well—when the little girl woke up screaming with a bad dream, it was always dear Aunt Frances who came to her bedside, a warm wrapper over her nightgown so that she need not hurry back to her own room, a candle lighting up her tired, kind face. She always took the little girl into her thin arms and held her close against her thin breast. “Tell Aunt Frances all about your naughty dream, darling,” she would murmur, “so’s to get it off your mind!”

She had read in her books that you can tell a great deal about children’s inner lives by analyzing their dreams, and besides, if she did not urge Elizabeth Ann to tell it, she was afraid the sensitive, nervous little thing would “lie awake and brood over it.” This was the phrase she always used the next day to her mother when Aunt Harriet exclaimed about her paleness and the dark rings under her eyes. So she listened patiently while the little girl told her all about the fearful dreams she had, the great dogs with huge red mouths that ran after her, the Indians who scalped her, her schoolhouse on fire so that she had to jump from a third-story window and was all broken to bits—once in a while Elizabeth Ann got so interested in all this that she went on and made up more awful things even than she had dreamed, and told long stories which showed her to be a child of great imagination. But all these dreams and continuations of dreams Aunt Frances wrote down the first thing the next morning, and, with frequent references to a thick book full of hard words, she tried her best to puzzle out from them exactly what kind of little girl Elizabeth Ann really was.

There was one dream, however, that even conscientious Aunt Frances never tried to analyze, because it was too sad. Elizabeth Ann dreamed sometimes that she was dead and lay in a little white coffin with white roses over her. Oh, that made Aunt Frances cry, and so did Elizabeth Ann. It was very touching. Then, after a long, long time of talk and tears and sobs and hugs, the little girl would begin to get drowsy, and Aunt Frances would rock her to sleep in her arms, and lay her down ever so quietly, and slip away to try to get a little nap herself before it was time to get up.

At a quarter of nine every weekday morning Aunt Frances dropped whatever else she was doing, took Elizabeth Ann’s little, thin, white hand protectingly in hers, and led her through the busy streets to the big brick school-building where the little girl had always gone to school. It was four stories high, and when all the classes were in session there were six hundred children under that one roof. You can imagine, perhaps, the noise there was on the playground just before school! Elizabeth Ann shrank from it with all her soul, and clung more tightly than ever to Aunt Frances’s hand as she was led along through the crowded, shrieking masses of children. Oh, how glad she was that she had Aunt Frances there to take care of her, though as a matter of fact nobody noticed the little thin girl at all, and her very own classmates would hardly have known whether she came to school or not. Aunt Frances took her safely through the ordeal of the playground, then up the long, broad stairs, and pigeonholed her carefully in her own schoolroom. She was in the third grade,—3A, you understand, which is almost the fourth.

Then at noon Aunt Frances was waiting there, a patient, never-failing figure, to walk home with her little charge; and in the afternoon the same thing happened over again. On the way to and from school they talked about what had happened in the class. Aunt Frances believed in sympathizing with a child’s life, so she always asked about every little thing, and remembered to inquire about the continuation of every episode, and sympathized with all her heart over the failure in mental arithmetic, and triumphed over Elizabeth Ann’s beating the Schmidt girl in spelling, and was indignant over the teacher’s having pets. Sometimes in telling over some very dreadful failure or disappointment Elizabeth Ann would get so wrought up that she would cry. This always brought the ready tears to Aunt Frances’s kind eyes, and with many soothing words and nervous, tremulous caresses she tried to make life easier for poor little Elizabeth Ann. The days when they had cried they could neither of them eat much luncheon.

After school and on Saturdays there was always the daily walk, and there were lessons, all kinds of lessons—piano lessons of course, and nature-study lessons out of an excellent book Aunt Frances had bought, and painting lessons, and sewing lessons, and even a little French, although Aunt Frances was not very sure about her own pronunciation. She wanted to give the little girl every possible advantage, you see. They were really inseparable. Elizabeth Ann once said to some ladies calling on her aunts that whenever anything happened in school, the first thing she thought of was what Aunt Frances would think of it.

“Why is that?” they asked, looking at Aunt Frances, who was blushing with pleasure.

“Oh, she is so interested in my school work! And she understands me!” said Elizabeth Ann, repeating the phrases she had heard so often.

Aunt Frances’s eyes filled with happy tears. She called Elizabeth Ann to her and kissed her and gave her as big a hug as her thin arms could manage. Elizabeth Ann was growing tall very fast. One of the visiting ladies said that before long she would be as big as her auntie, and a troublesome young lady. Aunt Frances said: “I have had her from the time she was a little baby and there has scarcely been an hour she has been out of my sight. I’ll always have her confidence. You’ll always tell Aunt Frances everything, won’t you, darling?” Elizabeth Ann resolved to do this always, even if, as now, she often had to invent things to tell.

Aunt Frances went on, to the callers: “But I do wish she weren’t so thin and pale and nervous. I suppose it is the exciting modern life that is so bad for children. I try to see that she has plenty of fresh air. I go out with her for a walk every single day. But we have taken all the walks around here so often that we’re rather tired of them. It’s often hard to know how to get her out enough. I think I’ll have to get the doctor to come and see her and perhaps give her a tonic.” To Elizabeth Ann she added, hastily: “Now don’t go getting notions in your head, darling. Aunt Frances doesn’t think there’s anything very much the matter with you. You’ll be all right again soon if you just take the doctor’s medicine nicely. Aunt Frances will take care of her precious little girl. She’ll make the bad sickness go away.” Elizabeth Ann, who had not known before that she was sick, had a picture of herself lying in the little white coffin, all covered over with white. ... In a few minutes Aunt Frances was obliged to excuse herself from her callers and devote herself entirely to taking care of Elizabeth Ann.

So one day, after this had happened several times, Aunt Frances really did send for the doctor, who came briskly in, just as Elizabeth Ann had always seen him, with his little square black bag smelling of leather, his sharp eyes, and the air of bored impatience which he always wore in that house. Elizabeth Ann was terribly afraid to see him, for she felt in her bones he would say she had galloping consumption and would die before the leaves cast a shadow. This was a phrase she had picked up from Grace, whose conversation, perhaps on account of her asthma, was full of references to early graves and quick declines.

And yet—did you ever hear of such a case before?—although Elizabeth Ann when she first stood up before the doctor had been quaking with fear lest he discover some deadly disease in her, she was very much hurt indeed when, after thumping her and looking at her lower eyelid inside out, and listening to her breathing, he pushed her away with a little jerk and said: “There’s nothing in the world the matter with that child. She’s as sound as a nut! What she needs is ...”—he looked for a moment at Aunt Frances’s thin, anxious face, with the eyebrows drawn together in a knot of conscientiousness, and then he looked at Aunt Harriet’s thin, anxious face with the eyebrows drawn up that very same way, and then he glanced at Grace’s thin, anxious face peering from the door waiting for his verdict—and then he drew a long breath, shut his lips and his little black case very tightly, and did not go on to say what it was that Elizabeth Ann needed.

Of course Aunt Frances didn’t let him off as easily as that, you may be sure. She fluttered around him as he tried to go, and she said all sorts of fluttery things to him, like “But, Doctor, she hasn’t gained a pound in three months ... and her sleep ... and her appetite ... and her nerves ...”

The doctor said back to her, as he put on his hat, all the things doctors always say under such conditions: “More beefsteak ... plenty of fresh air ... more sleep ... She’ll be all right ...” but his voice did not sound as though he thought what he was saying amounted to much. Nor did Elizabeth Ann. She had hoped for some spectacular red pills to be taken every half-hour, like those Grace’s doctor gave her whenever she felt low in her mind.

And just then something happened which changed Elizabeth Ann’s life forever and ever. It was a very small thing, too. Aunt Harriet coughed. Elizabeth Ann did not think it at all a bad-sounding cough in comparison with Grace’s hollow whoop; Aunt Harriet had been coughing like that ever since the cold weather set in, for three or four months now, and nobody had thought anything of it, because they were all so much occupied in taking care of the sensitive, nervous little girl who needed so much care.

And yet, at the sound of that little discreet cough behind Aunt Harriet’s hand, the doctor whirled around and fixed his sharp eyes on her, with all the bored, impatient look gone, the first time Elizabeth Ann had ever seen him look interested. “What’s that? What’s that?” he said, going over quickly to Aunt Harriet. He snatched out of his little bag a shiny thing with two rubber tubes attached, and he put the ends of the tubes in his ears and the shiny thing up against Aunt Harriet, who was saying, “It’s nothing, Doctor ... a little teasing cough I’ve had this winter. And I meant to tell you, too, but I forgot it, that that sore spot on my lungs doesn’t go away as it ought to.”

The doctor motioned her very impolitely to stop talking, and listened very hard through his little tubes. Then he turned around and looked at Aunt Frances as though he were angry at her. He said, “Take the child away and then come back here yourself.”

And that was almost all that Elizabeth Ann ever knew of the forces which swept her away from the life which had always gone on, revolving about her small person, exactly the same ever since she could remember.

You have heard so much about tears in the account of Elizabeth Ann’s life so far that I won’t tell you much about the few days which followed, as the family talked over and hurriedly prepared to obey the doctor’s verdict, which was that Aunt Harriet was very, very sick and must go away at once to a warm climate, and Aunt Frances must go, too, but not Elizabeth Ann, for Aunt Frances would need to give all her time to taking care of Aunt Harriet. And anyhow the doctor didn’t think it best, either for Aunt Harriet or for Elizabeth Ann, to have them in the same house.

Grace couldn’t go of course, but to everybody’s surprise she said she didn’t mind, because she had a bachelor brother, who kept a grocery store, who had been wanting her for years to go and keep house for him. She said she had stayed on just out of conscientiousness because she knew Aunt Harriet couldn’t get along without her! And if you notice, that’s the way things often happen to very, very conscientious people.

Elizabeth Ann, however, had no grocer brother. She had, it is true, a great many relatives, and of course it was settled she should go to some of them till Aunt Frances could take her back. For the time being, just now, while everything was so distracted and confused, she was to go to stay with the Lathrop cousins, who lived in the same city, although it was very evident that the Lathrops were not perfectly crazy with delight over the prospect.

Still, something had to be done at once, and Aunt Frances was so frantic with the packing up, and the moving men coming to take the furniture to storage, and her anxiety over her mother—she had switched to Aunt Harriet, you see, all the conscientiousness she had lavished on Elizabeth Ann—nothing much could be extracted from her about Elizabeth Ann. “Just keep her for the present, Molly!” she said to Cousin Molly Lathrop. “I’ll do something soon. I’ll write you. I’ll make another arrangement ... but just now....”

Her voice was quavering on the edge of tears, and Cousin Molly Lathrop, who hated scenes, said hastily, “Yes, oh, yes, of course. For the present ...” and went away, thinking that she didn’t see why she should have all the disagreeable things to do. When she had her husband’s tyrannical old mother to take care of, wasn’t that enough, without adding to the household such a nervous, spoiled, morbid young one as Elizabeth Ann!

Elizabeth Ann did not of course for a moment dream that Cousin Molly was thinking any such things about her, but she could not help seeing that Cousin Molly was not any too enthusiastic about taking her in; and she was already feeling terribly forlorn about the sudden, unexpected change in Aunt Frances, who had been so wrapped up in her and now was just as much wrapped up in Aunt Harriet. Do you know, I am sorry for Elizabeth Ann, and, what’s more, I have been ever since this story began.

Well, since I promised you that I was not going to tell about more tears, I won’t say a single word about the day when the two aunts went away on the train, for there is nothing much but tears to tell about, except perhaps an absent look in Aunt Frances’s eyes which hurt the little girl’s feelings dreadfully.

And then Cousin Molly took the hand of the sobbing little girl and led her back to the Lathrop house. But if you think you are now going to hear about the Lathrops, you are quite mistaken, for just at this moment old Mrs. Lathrop took a hand in the matter. She was Cousin Molly’s husband’s mother, and, of course, no relation at all to Elizabeth Ann, and so was less enthusiastic than anybody else. All that Elizabeth Ann ever saw of this old lady, who now turned the current of her life again, was her head, sticking out of a second-story window; and that’s all that you need to know about her, either. It was a very much agitated old head, and it bobbed and shook with the intensity with which the imperative old voice called upon Cousin Molly and Elizabeth Ann to stop right there where they were on the front walk.

“The doctor says that what’s the matter with Bridget is scarlet fever, and we’ve all got to be quarantined. There’s no earthly sense bringing that child in to be sick and have it, and be nursed, and make the quarantine twice as long!”

“But, Mother!” called Cousin Molly, “I can’t leave the child in the middle of the street!”

Elizabeth Ann was actually glad to hear her say that, because she was feeling so awfully unwanted, which is, if you think of it, not a very cheerful feeling for a little girl who has been the hub round which a whole household was revolving.

“You don’t have to!” shouted old Mrs. Lathrop out of her second-story window. Although she did not add “You gump!” aloud, you could feel she was meaning just that. “You don’t have to! You can just send her to the Putney cousins. All nonsense about her not going there in the first place. They invited her the minute they heard of Harriet’s being so bad. They’re the natural ones to take her in. Abigail is her mother’s own aunt, and Ann is her own first-cousin-once-removed ... just as close as Harriet and Frances are, and much closer than you! And on a farm and all ... just the place for her!”

“But how under the sun, Mother!” shouted Cousin Molly back, “can I get her to the Putneys’? You can’t send a child of nine a thousand miles without ...”

Old Mrs. Lathrop looked again as though she were saying “You gump!” and said aloud, “Why, there’s James, going to New York on business in a few days anyhow. He can just go now, and take her along and put her on the right train at Albany. If he wires from here, they’ll meet her in Hillsboro.”

And that was just what happened. Perhaps you may have guessed by this time that when old Mrs. Lathrop issued orders they were usually obeyed. As to who the Bridget was who had the scarlet fever, I know no more than you. I take it, from the name, she was the cook. Unless, indeed, old Mrs. Lathrop made her up for the occasion, which I think she would have been quite capable of doing, don’t you?

At any rate, with no more ifs or ands, Elizabeth Ann’s satchel was packed, and Cousin James Lathrop’s satchel was packed, and the two set off together, the big, portly, middle-aged man quite as much afraid of his mother as Elizabeth Ann was. But he was going to New York, and it is conceivable that he thought once or twice on the trip that there were good times in New York as well as business engagements, whereas poor Elizabeth Ann was being sent straight to the one place in the world where there were no good times at all. Aunt Harriet had said so, ever so many times. Poor Elizabeth Ann!

CHAPTER II
BETSY HOLDS THE REINS

You can imagine, perhaps, the dreadful terror of Elizabeth Ann as the train carried her along toward Vermont and the horrible Putney Farm! It had happened so quickly—her satchel packed, the telegram sent, the train caught—that she had not had time to get her wits together, assert herself, and say that she would not go there! Besides, she had a sinking notion that perhaps they wouldn’t pay any attention to her if she did. The world had come to an end now that Aunt Frances wasn’t there to take care of her! Even in the most familiar air she could only half breathe without Aunt Frances! And now she was not even being taken to the Putney Farm! She was being sent!

She shrank together in her seat, more and more frightened as the end of her journey came nearer, and looked out dismally at the winter landscape, thinking it hideous with its brown bare fields, its brown bare trees, and the quick-running little streams hurrying along, swollen with the January thaw which had taken all the snow from the hills. She had heard her elders say about her so many times that she could not stand the cold, that she shivered at the very thought of cold weather, and certainly nothing could look colder than that bleak country into which the train was now slowly making its way.

The engine puffed and puffed with great laboring breaths that shook Elizabeth Ann’s diaphragm up and down, but the train moved more and more slowly. Elizabeth Ann could feel under her feet how the floor of the car was tipped up as it crept along the steep incline. “Pretty stiff grade here?” said a passenger to the conductor.

“You bet!” he assented. “But Hillsboro is the next station and that’s at the top of the hill. We go down after that to Rutland.” He turned to Elizabeth Ann—“Say, little girl, didn’t your uncle say you were to get off at Hillsboro? You’d better be getting your things together.”

Poor Elizabeth Ann’s knees knocked against each other with fear of the strange faces she was to encounter, and when the conductor came to help her get off, he had to carry the white, trembling child as well as her satchel. But there was only one strange face there,—not another soul in sight at the little wooden station. A grim-faced old man in a fur cap and heavy coat stood by a lumber wagon.

“This is her, Mr. Putney,” said the conductor, touching his cap, and went back to the train, which went away shrieking for a nearby crossing and setting the echoes ringing from one mountain to another.

There was Elizabeth Ann alone with her much-feared Great-uncle Henry. He nodded to her, and drew out from the bottom of the wagon a warm, large cape, which he slipped over her shoulders. “The women folks were afraid you’d git cold drivin’,” he explained. He then lifted her high to the seat, tossed her satchel into the wagon, climbed up himself, and clucked to his horses. Elizabeth Ann had always before thought it an essential part of railway journeys to be much kissed at the end and asked a great many times how you had “stood the trip.”

She sat very still on the high lumber seat, feeling very forlorn and neglected. Her feet dangled high above the floor of the wagon. She felt herself to be in the most dangerous place she had ever dreamed of in her worst dreams. Oh, why wasn’t Aunt Frances there to take care of her! It was just like one of her bad dreams—yes, it was horrible! She would fall, she would roll under the wheels and be crushed to ... She looked up at Uncle Henry with the wild, strained eyes of nervous terror which always brought Aunt Frances to her in a rush to “hear all about it,” to sympathize, to reassure.

Uncle Henry looked down at her soberly, his hard, weather-beaten old face quite unmoved. “Here, you drive, will you, for a piece?” he said briefly, putting the reins into her hands, hooking his spectacles over his ears, and drawing out a stubby pencil and a bit of paper. “I’ve got some figgering to do. You pull on the left-hand rein to make ’em go to the left and t’other way for t’other way, though ’tain’t likely we’ll meet any teams.”

Elizabeth Ann had been so near one of her wild screams of terror that now, in spite of her instant absorbed interest in the reins, she gave a queer little yelp. She was all ready with the explanation, her conversations with Aunt Frances having made her very fluent in explanations of her own emotions. She would tell Uncle Henry about how scared she had been, and how she had just been about to scream and couldn’t keep back that one little ... But Uncle Henry seemed not to have heard her little howl, or, if he had, didn’t think it worth conversation, for he ... oh, the horses were certainly going to one side! She hastily decided which was her right hand (she had never been forced to know it so quickly before) and pulled furiously on that rein. The horses turned their hanging heads a little, and, miraculously, there they were in the middle of the road again.

Elizabeth Ann drew a long breath of relief and pride, and looked to Uncle Henry for praise. But he was busily setting down figures as though he were getting his ’rithmetic lesson for the next day and had not noticed ... Oh, there they were going to the left again! This time, in her flurry, she made a mistake about which hand was which and pulled wildly on the left line! The horses docilely walked off the road into a shallow ditch, the wagon tilted ... help! Why didn’t Uncle Henry help! Uncle Henry continued intently figuring on the back of his envelope.

Elizabeth Ann, the perspiration starting out on her forehead, pulled on the other line. The horses turned back up the little slope, the wheel grated sickeningly against the wagonbox—she was sure they would tip over! But there! somehow there they were in the road, safe and sound, with Uncle Henry adding up a column of figures. If he only knew, thought the little girl, if he only knew the danger he had been in, and how he had been saved...! But she must think of some way to remember, for sure, which her right hand was, and avoid that hideous mistake again.

And then suddenly something inside Elizabeth Ann’s head stirred and moved. It came to her, like a clap, that she needn’t know which was right or left at all. If she just pulled the way she wanted them to go—the horses would never know whether it was the right or the left rein!

It is possible that what stirred inside her head at that moment was her brain, waking up. She was nine years old, and she was in the third A grade at school, but that was the first time she had ever had a whole thought of her very own. At home, Aunt Frances had always known exactly what she was doing, and had helped her over the hard places before she even knew they were there; and at school her teachers had been carefully trained to think faster than the scholars. Somebody had always been explaining things to Elizabeth Ann so industriously that she had never found out a single thing for herself before. This was a very small discovery, but an original one. Elizabeth Ann was as excited about it as a mother-bird over the first egg that hatches.

She forgot how afraid she was of Uncle Henry, and poured out to him her discovery. “It’s not right or left that matters!” she ended triumphantly; “it’s which way you want to go!” Uncle Henry looked at her attentively as she talked, eyeing her sidewise over the top of one spectacle-glass. When she finished—“Well, now, that’s so,” he admitted, and returned to his arithmetic.

It was a short remark, shorter than any Elizabeth Ann had ever heard before. Aunt Frances and her teachers always explained matters at length. But it had a weighty, satisfying ring to it. The little girl felt the importance of having her statement recognized. She turned back to her driving.

The slow, heavy plow horses had stopped during her talk with Uncle Henry. They stood as still now as though their feet had grown to the road. Elizabeth Ann looked up at the old man for instructions. But he was deep in his figures. She had been taught never to interrupt people, so she sat still and waited for him to tell her what to do.

But, although they were driving in the midst of a winter thaw, it was a pretty cold day, with an icy wind blowing down the back of her neck. The early winter twilight was beginning to fall, and she felt rather empty. She grew very tired of waiting, and remembered how the grocer’s boy at home had started his horse. Then, summoning all her courage, with an apprehensive glance at Uncle Henry’s arithmetical silence, she slapped the reins up and down on the horses’ backs and made the best imitation she could of the grocer’s boy’s cluck. The horses lifted their heads, they leaned forward, they put one foot before the other ... they were off! The color rose hot on Elizabeth Ann’s happy face. If she had started a big red automobile she would not have been prouder. For it was the first thing she had ever done all herself ... every bit ... every smitch! She had thought of it and she had done it. And it had worked!

Now for what seemed to her a long, long time she drove, drove so hard she could think of nothing else. She guided the horses around stones, she cheered them through freezing mud-puddles of melted snow, she kept them in the anxiously exact middle of the road. She was quite astonished when Uncle Henry put his pencil and paper away, took the reins from her hands, and drove into a yard, on one side of which was a little low white house and on the other a big red barn. He did not say a word, but she guessed that this was Putney Farm.

Two women in gingham dresses and white aprons came out of the house. One was old and one might be called young, just like Aunt Harriet and Aunt Frances. But they looked very different from those aunts. The dark-haired one was very tall and strong-looking, and the white-haired one was very rosy and fat. They both looked up at the little, thin, white-faced girl on the high seat, and smiled. “Well, Father, you got her, I see,” said the brown-haired one. She stepped up to the wagon and held up her arms to the child. “Come on, Betsy, and get some supper,” she said, as though Elizabeth Ann had lived there all her life and had just driven into town and back.

And that was the arrival of Elizabeth Ann at Putney Farm.

The brown-haired one took a long, strong step or two and swung her up on the porch. “You take her in, Mother,” she said. “I’ll help Father unhitch.”

The fat, rosy, white-haired one took Elizabeth Ann’s skinny, cold little hand in her soft warm fat one, and led her along to the open kitchen door. “I’m your Aunt Abigail,” she said. “Your mother’s aunt, you know. And that’s your Cousin Ann that lifted you down, and it was your Uncle Henry that brought you out from town.” She shut the door and went on, “I don’t know if your Aunt Harriet ever happened to tell you about us, and so ...”

Elizabeth Ann interrupted her hastily, the recollection of all Aunt Harriet’s remarks vividly before her. “Oh yes, oh yes!” she said. “She always talked about you. She talked about you a lot, she ...” The little girl stopped short and bit her lip.

If Aunt Abigail guessed from the expression on Elizabeth Ann’s face what kind of talking Aunt Harriet’s had been, she showed it only by a deepening of the wrinkles all around her eyes. She said, gravely: “Well, that’s a good thing. You know all about us then.” She turned to the stove and took out of the oven a pan of hot baked beans, very brown and crispy on top (Elizabeth Ann detested beans), and said, over her shoulder, “Take your things off, Betsy, and hang ’em on that lowest hook back of the door. That’s your hook.”

The little girl fumbled forlornly with the fastenings of her cape and the buttons of her coat. At home, Aunt Frances or Grace had always taken off her wraps and put them away for her. When, very sorry for herself, she turned away from the hook, Aunt Abigail said: “Now you must be cold. Pull a chair right up here by the stove.” She was stepping around quickly as she put supper on the table. The floor shook under her. She was one of the fattest people Elizabeth Ann had ever seen. After living with Aunt Frances and Aunt Harriet and Grace the little girl could scarcely believe her eyes. She stared and stared.

Aunt Abigail seemed not to notice this. Indeed, she seemed for the moment to have forgotten all about the newcomer. Elizabeth Ann sat on the wooden chair, her feet hanging (she had been taught that it was not manners to put her feet on the rungs), looking about her with miserable, homesick eyes. What an ugly, low-ceilinged room, with only a couple of horrid kerosene lamps for light; and they didn’t keep any girl, evidently; and they were going to eat right in the kitchen like poor people; and nobody spoke to her or looked at her or asked her how she had “stood the trip”; and here she was, millions of miles away from Aunt Frances, without anybody to take care of her. She began to feel the tight place in her throat which, by thinking about hard, she could always turn into tears, and presently her eyes began to water.

Aunt Abigail was not looking at her at all, but she now stopped short in one of her rushes to the table, set down the butter-plate she was carrying, and said “There!” as though she had forgotten something. She stooped—it was perfectly amazing how spry she was—and pulled out from under the stove a half-grown kitten, very sleepy, yawning and stretching, and blinking its eyes. “There, Betsy!” said Aunt Abigail, putting the little yellow and white ball into the child’s lap. “There is one of old Whitey’s kittens that didn’t get given away last summer, and she pesters the life out of me. I’ve got so much to do. When I heard you were coming, I thought maybe you would take care of her for me. If you want to, enough to bother to feed her and all, you can have her for your own.”

Elizabeth Ann bent her thin face over the warm, furry, friendly little animal. She could not speak. She had always wanted a kitten, but Aunt Frances and Aunt Harriet and Grace had always been sure that cats brought diphtheria and tonsilitis and all sorts of dreadful diseases to delicate little girls. She was afraid to move for fear the little thing would jump down and run away, but as she bent cautiously toward it the necktie of her middy blouse fell forward and the kitten in the middle of a yawn struck swiftly at it with a soft paw. Then, still too sleepy to play, it turned its head and began to lick Elizabeth Ann’s hand with a rough little tongue. Perhaps you can imagine how thrilled the little girl was at this!

She held her hand perfectly still until the kitten stopped and began suddenly washing its own face, and then she put her hands under it and very awkwardly lifted it up, burying her face in the soft fur. The kitten yawned again, and from the pink-lined mouth came a fresh, milky breath. “Oh!” said Elizabeth Ann under her breath. “Oh, you darling!” The kitten looked at her with bored, speculative eyes.

Elizabeth Ann looked up now at Aunt Abigail and said, “What is its name, please?” But the old woman was busy turning over a griddle full of pancakes and did not hear. On the train Elizabeth Ann had resolved not to call these hateful relatives by the same name she had for dear Aunt Frances, but she now forgot that resolution and said, again, “Oh, Aunt Abigail, what is its name?”

Aunt Abigail faced her blankly. “Name?” she asked. “Whose ... oh, the kitten’s? Goodness, child, I stopped racking my brain for kitten names sixty years ago. Name it yourself. It’s yours.”

Elizabeth Ann had already named it in her own mind, the name she had always thought she would call a kitten by, if she ever had one. It was Eleanor, the prettiest name she knew.

Aunt Abigail pushed a pitcher toward her. “There’s the cat’s saucer under the sink. Don’t you want to give it some milk?”

Elizabeth Ann got down from her chair, poured some milk into the saucer, and called: “Here, Eleanor! Here, Eleanor!”

Aunt Abigail looked at her sharply out of the corner of her eye and her lips twitched, but a moment later her face was immovably grave as she carried the last plate of pancakes to the table.

Elizabeth Ann sat on her heels for a long time, watching the kitten lap the milk, and she was surprised, when she stood up, to see that Cousin Ann and Uncle Henry had come in, very red-cheeked from the cold air.

“Well, folks,” said Aunt Abigail, “don’t you think we’ve done some lively stepping around, Betsy and I, to get supper all on the table for you?”

Elizabeth Ann stared. What did Aunt Abigail mean? She hadn’t done a thing about getting supper! But nobody made any comment, and they all took their seats and began to eat. Elizabeth Ann was astonishingly hungry, and she thought she could never get enough of the creamed potatoes, cold ham, hot cocoa, and pancakes. She was very much relieved that her refusal of beans caused no comment. Aunt Frances had always tried very hard to make her eat beans because they have so much protein in them, and growing children need protein. Elizabeth Ann had heard this said so many times she could have repeated it backward, but it had never made her hate beans any the less. However, nobody here seemed to know this, and Elizabeth Ann kept her knowledge to herself. They had also evidently never heard how delicate her digestion was, for she never saw anything like the number of pancakes they let her eat. All she wanted! She had never heard of such a thing!

They still did not ask her how she had “stood the trip.” They did not indeed ask her much of anything or pay very much attention to her beyond filling her plate as fast as she emptied it. In the middle of the meal Eleanor came, jumped into her lap, and curled down, purring. After this Elizabeth Ann kept one hand on the little soft ball, handling her fork with the other.

After supper—well, Elizabeth Ann never knew what did happen after supper until she felt somebody lifting her and carrying her upstairs. It was Cousin Ann, who carried her as lightly as though she were a baby, and who said, as she sat down on the floor in a slant-ceilinged bedroom, “You went right to sleep with your head on the table. I guess you’re pretty tired.”

Aunt Abigail was sitting on the edge of a great wide bed with four posts, and a curtain around the top. She was partly undressed, and was undoing her hair and brushing it out. It was very curly and all fluffed out in a shining white fuzz around her fat, pink face, full of soft wrinkles; but in a moment she was braiding it up again and putting on a tight white nightcap, which she tied under her chin.

“We got the word about your coming so late,” said Cousin Ann, “that we didn’t have time to fix you up a bedroom that can be warmed. So you’re going to sleep in here for a while. The bed’s big enough for two, I guess, even if they are as big as you and Mother.”

Elizabeth Ann stared again. What queer things they said here. She wasn’t nearly as big as Aunt Abigail!

“Mother, did you put Shep out?” asked Cousin Ann; and when Aunt Abigail said, “No! There! I forgot to!” Cousin Ann went away; and that was the last of her. They certainly believed in being saving of their words at Putney Farm.

Elizabeth Ann began to undress. She was only half-awake; and that made her feel only about half her age, which wasn’t very great, the whole of it, and she felt like just crooking her arm over her eyes and giving up! She was too forlorn! She had never slept with anybody before, and she had heard ever so many times how bad it was for children to sleep with grown-ups. An icy wind rattled the windows and puffed in around the loose old casings. On the window-sill lay a little wreath of snow. Elizabeth Ann shivered and shook on her thin legs, undressed in a hurry, and slipped into her night-dress. She felt just as cold inside as out, and never was more utterly miserable than in that strange, ugly little room, with that strange, queer, fat old woman. She was even too miserable to cry, and that is saying a great deal for Elizabeth Ann!

She got into bed first, because Aunt Abigail said she was going to keep the candle lighted for a while and read. “And anyhow,” she said, “I’d better sleep on the outside to keep you from rolling out.”

Elizabeth Ann and Aunt Abigail lay very still for a long time, Aunt Abigail reading out of a small, worn old book. Elizabeth Ann could see its title, “Essays of Emerson.” A book with that name had always laid on the center table in Aunt Harriet’s house, but that copy was all new and shiny, and Elizabeth Ann had never seen anybody look inside it. It was a very dull-looking book, with no pictures and no conversation. The little girl lay on her back, looking up at the cracks in the plaster ceiling and watching the shadows sway and dance as the candle flickered in the gusts of cold air. She herself began to feel a soft, pervasive warmth. Aunt Abigail’s great body was like a stove.

It was very, very quiet, quieter than any place Elizabeth Ann had ever known, except church, because a trolley-line ran past Aunt Harriet’s house and even at night there were always more or less bangings and rattlings. Here there was not a single sound except the soft, whispery noise when Aunt Abigail turned over a page as she read steadily and silently forward in her book. Elizabeth Ann turned her head so that she could see the round, rosy old face, full of soft wrinkles, and the calm, steady old eyes which were fixed on the page. And as she lay there in the warm bed, watching that quiet face, something very queer began to happen to Elizabeth Ann. She felt as though a tight knot inside her were slowly being untied. She felt—what was it she felt? There are no words for it. From deep within her something rose up softly ... she drew one or two long, half-sobbing breaths....

Aunt Abigail laid down her book and looked over at the child. “Do you know,” she said, in a conversational tone, “do you know, I think it’s going to be real nice, having a little girl in the house again.”

Oh, then the tight knot in the little unwanted girl’s heart was loosened indeed! It all gave way at once, and Elizabeth Ann burst suddenly into hot tears—yes, I know I said I would not tell you any more about her crying; but these tears were very different from any she had ever shed before. And they were the last, too, for a long, long time.

Aunt Abigail said, “Well, well!” and moving over in bed took the little weeping girl into her arms. She did not say another word then, but she put her soft, withered old cheek close against Elizabeth Ann’s, till the sobs began to grow less, and then she said: “I hear your kitty crying outside the door. Shall I let her in? I expect she’d like to sleep with you. I guess there’s room for three of us.”

She got out of bed as she spoke and walked across the room to the door. The floor shook under her great bulk, and the peak of her nightcap made a long, grotesque shadow. But as she came back with the kitten in her arms Elizabeth Ann saw nothing funny in her looks. She gave Eleanor to the little girl and got into bed again. “There, now, I guess we’re ready for the night,” she said. “You put the kitty on the other side of you so she won’t fall out of bed.”

She blew the light out and moved over a little closer to Elizabeth Ann, who immediately was enveloped in that delicious warmth. The kitten curled up under the little girl’s chin. Between her and the terrors of the dark room loomed the rampart of Aunt Abigail’s great body.

Elizabeth Ann drew a long, long breath ... and when she opened her eyes the sun was shining in at the window.

CHAPTER III
A SHORT MORNING

Aunt Abigail was gone, Eleanor was gone. The room was quite empty except for the bright sunshine pouring in through the small-paned windows. Elizabeth Ann stretched and yawned and looked about her. What funny wall-paper it was—so old-fashioned looking! The picture was of a blue river and a brown mill, with green willow-trees over it, and a man with sacks on his horse’s back stood in front of the mill. This picture was repeated a great many times, all over the paper; and in the corner, where it hadn’t come out even, they had had to cut it right down the middle of the horse. It was very curious-looking. She stared at it a long time, waiting for somebody to tell her when to get up. At home Aunt Frances always told her, and helped her get dressed. But here nobody came. She discovered that the heat came from a hole in the floor near the bed, which opened down into the room below. From it came a warm breath of baking bread and a muffled thump once in a while.

The sun rose higher and higher, and Elizabeth Ann grew hungrier and hungrier. Finally it occurred to her that it was not absolutely necessary to have somebody tell her to get up. She reached for her clothes and began to dress. When she had finished she went out into the hall, and with a return of her aggrieved, abandoned feeling (you must remember that her stomach was very empty) she began to try to find her way downstairs. She soon found the steps, went down them one at a time, and pushed open the door at the foot. Cousin Ann, the brown-haired one, was ironing near the stove. She nodded and smiled as the child came into the room, and said, “Well, you must feel rested!”

“Oh, I haven’t been asleep!” explained Elizabeth Ann. “I was waiting for somebody to tell me to get up.”

“Oh,” said Cousin Ann, opening her black eyes a little. “Were you?” She said no more than this, but Elizabeth Ann decided hastily that she would not add, as she had been about to, that she was also waiting for somebody to help her dress and do her hair. As a matter of fact, she had greatly enjoyed doing her own hair—the first time she had ever tried it. It had never occurred to Aunt Frances that her little baby-girl had grown-up enough to be her own hairdresser, nor had it occurred to Elizabeth Ann that this might be possible. But as she struggled with the snarls she had had a sudden wild idea of doing it a different way from the pretty fashion Aunt Frances always followed. Elizabeth Ann had always secretly envied a girl in her class whose hair was all tied back from her face, with one big knot in her ribbon at the back of her neck. It looked so grown-up. And this morning she had done hers that way, turning her neck till it ached, so that she could see the coveted tight effect at the back. And still—aren’t little girls queer?—although she had enjoyed doing her own hair, she was very much inclined to feel hurt because Cousin Ann had not come to do it for her.

Cousin Ann set her iron down with the soft thump which Elizabeth Ann had heard upstairs. She began folding a napkin, and said: “Now reach yourself a bowl off the shelf yonder. The oatmeal’s in that kettle on the stove and the milk is in the blue pitcher. If you want a piece of bread and butter, here’s a new loaf just out of the oven, and the butter’s in that brown crock.”

Elizabeth Ann followed these instructions and sat down before this quickly assembled breakfast in a very much surprised silence. At home it took the girl more than half an hour to get breakfast and set the table, and then she had to wait on them besides. She began to pour the milk out of the pitcher and stopped suddenly. “Oh, I’m afraid I’ve taken more than my share!” she said apologetically.

Cousin Ann looked up from her rapidly moving iron, and said, in an astonished voice: “Your share? What do you mean?”

“My share of the quart,” explained Elizabeth Ann. At home they bought a quart of milk and a cup of cream every day, and they were all very conscientious about not taking more than their due share.

“Good land, child, take all the milk you want!” said Cousin Ann, as though she found something shocking in what the little girl had just said. Elizabeth Ann thought to herself that she spoke as though milk ran out of a faucet, like water.

She was very fond of milk, and she made a very good breakfast as she sat looking about the low-ceilinged room. It was unlike any room she had ever seen.

It was, of course, the kitchen, and yet it didn’t seem possible that the same word could be applied to that room and the small, dark cubby-hole which had been Grace’s asthmatical kingdom. This room was very long and narrow, and all along one side were windows with white, ruffled curtains drawn back at the sides, and with small, shining panes of glass, through which the sun poured a golden flood of light on a long shelf of potted plants that took the place of a window-sill. The shelf was covered with shining white oil-cloth, the pots were of clean reddish brown, the sturdy, stocky plants of bright green with clear red-and-white flowers. Elizabeth Ann’s eyes wandered all over the kitchen from the low, white ceiling to the clean, bare wooden floor, but they always came back to those sunny windows. Once, back in the big brick school-building, as she had sat drooping her thin shoulders over her desk, some sort of a procession had gone by with a brass band playing a lively air. For some queer reason, every time she now glanced at that sheet of sunlight and the bright flowers she had a little of the same thrill which had straightened her back and gone up and down her spine while the band was playing. Possibly Aunt Frances was right, after all, and Elizabeth Ann was a very impressionable child. I wonder, by the way, if anybody ever saw a child who wasn’t.

At one end, the end where Cousin Ann was ironing, stood the kitchen stove, gleaming black, with a tea-kettle humming away on it, a big hot-water boiler near it, and a large kitchen cabinet with lots of drawers and shelves and hooks and things. Beyond that, in the middle of the room, was the table where they had had supper last night, and at which the little girl now sat eating her very late breakfast; and beyond that, at the other end of the room, was another table with an old dark-red cashmere shawl on it for a cover. A large lamp stood in the middle of this, a bookcase near it, two or three rocking-chairs around it, and back of it, against the wall, was a wide sofa covered with bright cretonne, with three bright pillows. Something big and black and woolly was lying on this sofa, snoring loudly. As Cousin Ann saw the little girl’s fearful glance alight on this she explained: “That’s Shep, our old dog. Doesn’t he make an awful noise! Mother says, when she happens to be alone here in the evening, it’s real company to hear Shep snore—as good as having a man in the house.”

Although this did not seem at all a sensible remark to Elizabeth Ann, who thought soberly to herself that she didn’t see why snoring made a dog as good as a man, still she was acute enough (for she was really quite an intelligent little girl) to feel that it belonged in the same class of remarks as one or two others she had noted as “queer” in the talk at Putney Farm last night. This variety of talk was entirely new to her, nobody in Aunt Harriet’s conscientious household ever making anything but plain statements of fact. It was one of the “queer Putney ways” which Aunt Harriet had forgotten to mention. It is possible that Aunt Harriet had never noticed it.

When Elizabeth Ann finished her breakfast, Cousin Ann made three suggestions, using exactly the same accent for them all. She said: “Wouldn’t you better wash your dishes up now before they get sticky? And don’t you want one of those red apples from the dish on the side table? And then maybe you’d like to look around the house so’s to know where you are.” Elizabeth Ann had never washed a dish in all her life, and she had always thought that nobody but poor, ignorant people, who couldn’t afford to hire girls, did such things. And yet (it was odd) she did not feel like saying this to Cousin Ann, who stood there so straight in her gingham dress and apron, with her clear, bright eyes and red cheeks. Besides this feeling, Elizabeth Ann was overcome with embarrassment at the idea of undertaking a new task in that casual way. How in the world did you wash dishes? She stood rooted to the spot, irresolute, horribly shy, and looking, though she did not know it, very clouded and sullen. Cousin Ann said briskly, holding an iron up to her cheek to see if it was hot enough: “Just take them over to the sink there and hold them under the hot-water faucet. They’ll be clean in no time. The dish-towels are those hanging on the rack over the stove.”

Elizabeth Ann moved promptly over to the sink, as though Cousin Ann’s words had shoved her there, and before she knew it, her saucer, cup, and spoon were clean and she was wiping them on a dry checked towel. “The spoon goes in the side-table drawer with the other silver, and the saucer and cup in those shelves there behind the glass doors where the china belongs,” continued Cousin Ann, thumping hard with her iron on a napkin and not looking up at all, “and don’t forget your apple as you go out. Those Northern Spies are just getting to be good about now. When they first come off the tree in October you could shoot them through an oak plank.”

Now Elizabeth Ann knew that this was a foolish thing to say, since of course an apple never could go through a board; but something that had always been sound asleep in her brain woke up a little, little bit and opened one eye. For it occurred dimly to Elizabeth Ann that this was a rather funny way of saying that Northern Spies were very hard when you first pick them in the autumn. She had to figure it out for herself very slowly, because it was a new idea to her, and she was half-way through her tour of inspection of the house before there glimmered on her lips, in a faint smile, the first recognition of humor in all her life. She felt a momentary impulse to call down to Cousin Ann that she saw the point, but before she had taken a single step toward the head of the stairs she had decided not to do this. Cousin Ann, with her bright, dark eyes, and her straight back, and her long arms, and her way of speaking as though it never occurred to her that you wouldn’t do just as she said—Elizabeth Ann was not very sure that she liked Cousin Ann, and she was very sure that she was afraid of her.

So she went on, walking from one room to another, industriously eating the red apple, the biggest she had ever seen. It was the best, too, with its crisp, white flesh and the delicious, sour-sweet juice which made Elizabeth Ann feel with each mouthful like hurrying to take another. She did not think much more of the other rooms in the house than she had of the kitchen. There were no draped “throws” over anything; there were no lace curtains at the windows, just dotted Swiss like the kitchen; all the ceilings were very low; the furniture was all of dark wood and very old-looking; what few rugs there were were of bright-colored rags; the mirrors were queer and old, with funny old pictures at the top; there wasn’t a brass bed in any of the bedrooms, just old wooden ones with posts, and curtains round the tops; and there was not a single plush portiere in the parlor, whereas at Aunt Harriet’s there had been two sets for that one room.

She was relieved at the absence of a piano and secretly rejoiced that she would not need to practice. In her heart she had not liked her music lessons at all, but she had never dreamed of not accepting them from Aunt Frances as she accepted everything else. Also she had liked to hear Aunt Frances boast about how much better she could play than other children of her age.

She was downstairs by this time, and, opening a door out of the parlor, found herself back in the kitchen, the long line of sunny windows and the bright flowers giving her that quick little thrill again. Cousin Ann looked up from her ironing, nodded, and said: “All through? You’d better come in and get warmed up. Those rooms get awfully cold these January days. Winters we mostly use this room so’s to get the good of the kitchen stove.” She added after a moment, during which Elizabeth Ann stood by the stove, warming her hands: “There’s one place you haven’t seen yet—the milk-room. Mother’s down there now, churning. That’s the door—the middle one.”

Elizabeth Ann had been wondering and wondering where in the world Aunt Abigail was. So she stepped quickly to the door, and went dawn the cold dark stairs she found there. At the bottom was a door, locked apparently, for she could find no fastening. She heard steps inside, the door was briskly cast open, and she almost fell into the arms of Aunt Abigail, who caught her as she stumbled forward, saying: “Well, I’ve been expectin’ you down here for a long time. I never saw a little girl yet who didn’t like to watch butter-making. Don’t you love to run the butter-worker over it? I do, myself, for all I’m seventy-two!”

“I don’t know anything about it,” said Elizabeth Ann. “I don’t know what you make butter out of. We always bought ours.”

“Well, for goodness’ sakes!” said Aunt Abigail. She turned and called across the room, “Henry, did you ever! Here’s Betsy saying she don’t know what we make butter out of! She actually never saw anybody making butter!”

Uncle Henry was sitting down, near the window, turning the handle to a small barrel swung between two uprights. He stopped for a moment and considered Aunt Abigail’s remark with the same serious attention he had given to Elizabeth Ann’s discovery about left and right. Then he began to turn the churn over and over again and said, peaceably: “Well, Mother, you never saw anybody laying asphalt pavement, I’ll warrant you! And I suppose Betsy knows all about that.”

Elizabeth Ann’s spirits rose. She felt very superior indeed. “Oh, yes,” she assured them, “I know all about that! Didn’t you ever see anybody doing that? Why, I’ve seen them hundreds of times! Every day as we went to school they were doing over the whole pavement for blocks along there.”

Aunt Abigail and Uncle Henry looked at her with interest, and Aunt Abigail said: “Well, now, think of that! Tell us all about it!”

“Why, there’s a big black sort of wagon,” began Elizabeth Ann, “and they run it up and down and pour out the black stuff on the road. And that’s all there is to it.” She stopped, rather abruptly, looking uneasy. Uncle Henry inquired: “Now there’s one thing I’ve always wanted to know. How do they keep that stuff from hardening on them? How do they keep it hot?”

The little girl looked blank. “Why, a fire, I suppose,” she faltered, searching her memory desperately and finding there only a dim recollection of a red glow somewhere connected with the familiar scene at which she had so often looked with unseeing eyes.

“Of course a fire,” agreed Uncle Henry. “But what do they burn in it, coke or coal or wood or charcoal? And how do they get any draft to keep it going?”

Elizabeth Ann shook her head. “I never noticed,” she said.

Aunt Abigail asked her now, “What do they do to the road before they pour it on?”

“Do?” said Elizabeth Ann. “I didn’t know they did anything.”

“Well, they can’t pour it right on a dirt road, can they?” asked Aunt Abigail. “Don’t they put down cracked stone or something?”

Elizabeth Ann looked down at her toes. “I never noticed,” she said.

“I wonder how long it takes for it to harden?” said Uncle Henry.

“I never noticed,” said Elizabeth Ann, in a small voice.

Uncle Henry said, “Oh!” and stopped asking questions. Aunt Abigail turned away and put a stick of wood in the stove. Elizabeth Ann did not feel very superior now, and when Aunt Abigail said, “Now the butter’s beginning to come. Don’t you want to watch and see everything I do, so’s you can answer if anybody asks you how butter is made?” Elizabeth Ann understood perfectly what was in Aunt’s Abigail’s mind, and gave to the process of butter-making a more alert and aroused attention than she had ever before given to anything. It was so interesting, too, that in no time she forgot why she was watching, and was absorbed in the fascinations of the dairy for their own sake.

She looked in the churn as Aunt Abigail unscrewed the top, and saw the thick, sour cream separating into buttermilk and tiny golden particles. “It’s gathering,” said Aunt Abigail, screwing the lid back on. “Father’ll churn it a little more till it really comes. And you and I will scald the wooden butter things and get everything ready. You’d better take that apron there to keep your dress clean.”

Wouldn’t Aunt Frances have been astonished if she could have looked in on Elizabeth Ann that very first morning of her stay at the hateful Putney Farm and have seen her wrapped in a gingham apron, her face bright with interest, trotting here and there in the stone-floored milk-room! She was allowed the excitement of pulling out the plug from the bottom of the churn, and dodged back hastily to escape the gush of buttermilk spouting into the pail held by Aunt Abigail. And she poured the water in to wash the butter, and screwed on the top herself, and, again all herself (for Uncle Henry had gone off as soon as the butter had “come”), swung the barrel back and forth six or seven times to swish the water all through the particles of butter. She even helped Aunt Abigail scoop out the great yellow lumps—her imagination had never conceived of so much butter in all the world! Then Aunt Abigail let her run the curiously shaped wooden butter-worker back and forth over the butter, squeezing out the water, and then pile it up again with her wooden paddle into a mound of gold. She weighed out the salt needed on the scales, and was very much surprised to find that there really is such a thing as an ounce. She had never met it before outside the pages of her arithmetic book and she didn’t know it lived anywhere else.

After the salt was worked in she watched Aunt Abigail’s deft, wrinkled old hands make pats and rolls. It looked like the greatest fun, and too easy for anything; and when Aunt Abigail asked her if she wouldn’t like to make up the last half-pound into a pat for dinner, she took up the wooden paddle confidently. And then she got one of the surprises that Putney Farm seemed to have for her. She discovered that her hands didn’t seem to belong to her at all, that her fingers were all thumbs, that she didn’t seem to know in the least beforehand how hard a stroke she was going to give nor which way her fingers were going to go. It was, as a matter of fact, the first time Elizabeth Ann had tried to do anything with her hands except to write and figure and play on the piano, and naturally she wasn’t very well acquainted with them. She stopped in dismay, looking at the shapeless, battered heap of butter before her and holding out her hands as though they were not part of her.

Aunt Abigail laughed, took up the paddle, and after three or four passes the butter was a smooth, yellow ball. “Well, that brings it all back to me!” she said “when I was a little girl, when my grandmother first let me try to make a pat. I was about five years old—my! what a mess I made of it! And I remember? doesn’t it seem funny—that she laughed and said her Great-aunt Elmira had taught her how to handle butter right here in this very milk-room. Let’s see, Grandmother was born the year the Declaration of Independence was signed. That’s quite a while ago, isn’t it? But butter hasn’t changed much, I guess, nor little girls either.”

Elizabeth Ann listened to this statement with a very queer, startled expression on her face, as though she hadn’t understood the words. Now for a moment she stood staring up in Aunt Abigail’s face, and yet not seeing her at all, because she was thinking so hard. She was thinking! “Why! There were real people living when the Declaration of Independence was signed—real people, not just history people—old women teaching little girls how to do things—right in this very room, on this very floor—and the Declaration of Independence just signed!”

To tell the honest truth, although she had passed a very good examination in the little book on American history they had studied in school, Elizabeth Ann had never to that moment had any notion that there ever had been really and truly any Declaration of Independence at all. It had been like the ounce, living exclusively inside her schoolbooks for little girls to be examined about. And now here Aunt Abigail, talking about a butter-pat, had brought it to life!

Of course all this only lasted a moment, because it was such a new idea! She soon lost track of what she was thinking of; she rubbed her eyes as though she were coming out of a dream, she thought, confusedly: “What did butter have to do with the Declaration of Independence? Nothing, of course! It couldn’t!” and the whole impression seemed to pass out of her mind. But it was an impression which was to come again and again during the next few months.

CHAPTER IV
BETSY GOES TO SCHOOL

Elizabeth Ann was very much surprised to hear Cousin Ann’s voice calling, “Dinner!” down the stairs. It did not seem possible that the whole morning had gone by. “Here,” said Aunt Abigail, “just put that pat on a plate, will you, and take it upstairs as you go. I’ve got all I can do to haul my own two hundred pounds up, without any half-pound of butter into the bargain.” The little girl smiled at this, though she did not exactly know why, and skipped up the stairs proudly with her butter.

Dinner was smoking on the table, which was set in the midst of the great pool of sunlight. A very large black-and-white dog, with a great bushy tail, was walking around and around the table, sniffing the air. He looked as big as a bear to Elizabeth Ann; and as he walked his great red tongue hung out of his mouth and his white teeth gleamed horribly. Elizabeth Ann shrank back in terror, clutching her plate of butter to her breast with tense fingers. Cousin. Ann said, over her shoulder: “Oh, bother! There’s old Shep, got up to pester us begging for scraps! Shep! You go and lie down this minute!” To Elizabeth Ann’s astonishment and immense relief, the great animal turned, drooping his head sadly, walked back across the floor, got upon the couch again, and laid his head down on one paw very forlornly, turning up the whites of his eyes meekly at Cousin Ann.

Aunt Abigail, who had just pulled herself up the stairs, panting, said, between laughing and puffing: “I’m glad I’m not an animal on this farm. Ann does boss them around so.” “Well, SOMEbody has to!” said Cousin Ann, advancing on the table with a platter. This proved to have chicken fricassee on it, and Elizabeth Ann’s heart melted in her at the smell. She loved chicken gravy on hot biscuits beyond anything in the world, but chickens are so expensive when you buy them in the market that Aunt Harriet hadn’t had them very often for dinner. And there was a plate of biscuits, golden brown, just coming out of the oven! She sat down very quickly, her mouth watering, and attacked with extreme haste the big plateful of food which Cousin Ann passed her.

At Aunt Harriet’s she had always been aware that everybody watched her anxiously as she ate, and she had heard so much about her light appetite that she felt she must live up to her reputation, and had a very natural and human hesitation about eating all she wanted when there happened to be something she liked very much. But nobody here knew that she “only ate enough to keep a bird alive,” and that her “appetite was so capricious!” Nor did anybody notice her while she stowed away the chicken and gravy and hot biscuits and currant jelly and baked potatoes and apple pie—when did Elizabeth Ann ever eat such a meal before! She actually felt her belt grow tight.

In the middle of the meal Cousin Ann got up to answer the telephone, which was in the next room. The instant the door had closed behind her Uncle Henry leaned forward, tapped Elizabeth Ann on the shoulder, and nodded toward the sofa. His eyes were twinkling, and as for Aunt Abigail she began to laugh silently, shaking all over, her napkin at her mouth to stifle the sound. Elizabeth Ann turned wonderingly and saw the old dog cautiously and noiselessly letting himself down from the sofa, one ear cocked rigidly in the direction of Cousin Ann’s voice in the next room. “The old tyke!” said Uncle Henry. “He always sneaks up to the table to be fed if Ann goes out for a minute. Here, Betsy, you’re nearest, give him this piece of skin from the chicken neck.” The big dog padded forward across the room, evidently in such a state of terror about Cousin Ann that Elizabeth Ann felt for him. She had a fellow-feeling about that relative of hers. Also it was impossible to be afraid of so abjectly meek and guilty an animal. As old Shep came up to her, poking his nose inquiringly on her lap, she shrinkingly held out the big piece of skin, and though she jumped back at the sudden snap and gobbling gulp with which the old dog greeted the tidbit, she could not but sympathize with his evident enjoyment of it. He waved his bushy tail gratefully, cocked his head on one side, and, his ears standing up at attention, his eyes glistening greedily, he gave a little, begging whine. “Oh, he’s asking for more!” cried Elizabeth Ann, surprised to see how plainly she could understand dog-talk. “Quick, Uncle Henry, give me another piece!”

Uncle Henry rapidly transferred to her plate a wing-bone from his own, and Aunt Abigail, with one deft swoop, contributed the neck from the platter. As fast as she could, Elizabeth Ann fed these to Shep, who woofed them down at top speed, the bones crunching loudly under his strong, white teeth. How he did enjoy it! It did your heart good to see his gusto!

There was the sound of the telephone receiver being hung up in the next room—and everybody acted at once. Aunt Abigail began drinking innocently out of her coffee-cup, only her laughing old eyes showing over the rim; Uncle Henry buttered a slice of bread with a grave face, as though he were deep in conjectures about who would be the next President; and as for old Shep, he made one plunge across the room, his toe-nails clicking rapidly on the bare floor, sprang up on the couch, and when Cousin Ann opened the door and came in he was lying in exactly the position in which she had left him, his paw stretched out, his head laid on it, his brown eyes turned up meekly so that the whites showed.

I’ve told you what these three did, but I haven’t told you yet what Elizabeth Ann did. And it is worth telling. As Cousin Ann stepped in, glancing suspiciously from her sober-faced and abstracted parents to the lamb-like innocence of old Shep, little Elizabeth Ann burst into a shout of laughter. It’s worth telling about, because, so far as I know, that was the first time she had ever laughed out heartily in all her life. For my part, I’m half surprised to know that she knew how.

Of course, when she laughed, Aunt Abigail had to laugh too, setting down her coffee-cup and showing all the funny wrinkles in her face screwed up hard with fun; and that made Uncle Henry laugh, and then Cousin Ann laughed and said, as she sat down, “You are bad children, the whole four of you!” And old Shep, seeing the state of things, stopped pretending to be meek, jumped down, and came lumbering over to the table, wagging his tail and laughing too; you know that good, wide dog-smile! He put his head on Elizabeth Ann’s lap again and she patted it and lifted up one of his big black ears. She had quite forgotten that she was terribly afraid of big dogs.

After dinner Cousin Ann looked up at the clock and said: “My goodness! Betsy’ll be late for school if she doesn’t start right off.” She explained to the child, aghast at this sudden thunderclap, “I let you sleep this morning as long as you wanted to, because you were so tired from your journey. But of course there’s no reason for missing the afternoon session.”

As Elizabeth Ann continued sitting perfectly still, frozen with alarm, Cousin Ann jumped up briskly, got the little coat and cap, helped her up, and began inserting the child’s arms into the sleeves. She pulled the cap well down over Elizabeth Ann’s ears, felt in the pocket and pulled out the mittens. “There,” she said, holding them out, “you’d better put them on before you go out, for it’s a real cold day.” As she led the stupefied little girl along toward the door Aunt Abigail came after them and put a big sugar-cookie into the child’s hand. “Maybe you’ll like to eat that for your recess time,” she said. “I always did when I went to school.”

Elizabeth Ann’s hand closed automatically about the cookie, but she scarcely heard what was said. She felt herself to be in a bad dream. Aunt Frances had never, no never, let her go to school alone, and on the first day of the year always took her to the new teacher and introduced her and told the teacher how sensitive she was and how hard to understand; and then she stayed there for an hour or two till Elizabeth Ann got used to things! She could not face a whole new school all alone—oh, she couldn’t, she wouldn’t! She couldn’t! Horrors! Here she was in the front hall—she was on the porch! Cousin Ann was saying: “Now run along, child. Straight down the road till the first turn to the left, and there in the cross-roads, there you are.” And now the front door closed behind her, the path stretched before her to the road, and the road led down the hill the way Cousin Ann had pointed. Elizabeth Ann’s feet began to move forward and carried her down the path, although she was still crying out to herself, “I can’t! I won’t! I can’t!”

Are you wondering why Elizabeth Ann didn’t turn right around, open the front door, walk in, and say, “I can’t! I won’t! I can’t!” to Cousin Ann?

The answer to that question is that she didn’t do it because Cousin Ann was Cousin Ann. And there’s more in that than you think! In fact, there is a mystery in it that nobody has ever solved, not even the greatest scientists and philosophers, although, like all scientists and philosophers, they think they have gone a long way toward explaining something they don’t understand by calling it a long name. The long name is “personality,” and what it means nobody knows, but it is perhaps the very most important thing in the world for all that. And yet we know only one or two things about it. We know that anybody’s personality is made up of the sum total of all the actions and thoughts and desires of his life. And we know that though there aren’t any words or any figures in any language to set down that sum total accurately, still it is one of the first things that everybody knows about anybody else. And that is really all we know!

So I can’t tell you why Elizabeth Ann did not go back and cry and sob and say she couldn’t and she wouldn’t and she couldn’t, as she would certainly have done at Aunt Harriet’s. You remember that I could not even tell you why it was that, as the little fatherless and motherless girl lay in bed looking at Aunt Abigail’s old face, she should feel so comforted and protected that she must needs break out crying. No, all I can say is that it was because Aunt Abigail was Aunt Abigail. But perhaps it may occur to you that it’s rather a good idea to keep a sharp eye on your “personality,” whatever that is! It might be very handy, you know, to have a personality like Cousin Ann’s which sent Elizabeth Ann’s feet down the path; or perhaps you would prefer one like Aunt Abigail’s. Well, take your choice.

You must not, of course, think for a moment that Elizabeth Ann had the slightest intention of obeying Cousin Ann. No indeed! Nothing was farther from her mind as her feet carried her along the path and into the road. In her mind was nothing but rebellion and fear and anger and oh, such hurt feelings! She turned sick at the very thought of facing all the staring, curious faces in the playground turned on the new scholar as she had seen them at home! She would never, never do it! She would walk around all the afternoon, and then go back and tell Cousin Ann that she couldn’t! She would explain to her how Aunt Frances never let her go out of doors without a loving hand to cling to. She would explain to her how Aunt Frances always took care of her! ... it was easier to think about what she would say and do and explain, away from Cousin Ann, than it was to say and do it before those black eyes. Aunt Frances’s eyes were soft, light blue.

Oh, how she wanted Aunt Frances to take care of her! Nobody cared a thing about her! Nobody understood her but Aunt Frances! She wouldn’t go back at all to Putney Farm. She would just walk on and on till she was lost, and the night would come and she would lie down and freeze to death, and then wouldn’t Cousin Ann feel ... Someone called to her, “Isn’t this Betsy?”

She looked up astonished. A young girl in a gingham dress and a white apron like those at Putney Farm stood in front of a tiny, square building, like a toy house. “Isn’t this Betsy?” asked the young girl again. “Your Cousin Ann said you were coming to school today and I’ve been looking out for you. But I saw you going right by, and I ran out to stop you.”

“Why, where is the school?” asked Betsy, staring around for a big brick, four-story building.

The young girl laughed and held out her hand. “This is the school,” she said, “and I am the teacher, and you’d better come right in, for it’s time to begin.”

She led Betsy into a low-ceilinged room with geraniums at the windows, where about a dozen children of different ages sat behind their desks. At the first sight of them Betsy blushed crimson with fright and shyness, and hung down her head; but, looking out the corners of her eyes, she saw that they, too, were all very red-faced and scared-looking and hung down their heads, looking at her shyly out of the corners of their eyes. She was so surprised by this that she forgot all about herself and looked inquiringly at the teacher.

“They don’t see many strangers,” the teacher explained, “and they feel very shy and scared when a new scholar comes, especially one from the city.”

“Is this my grade?” asked Elizabeth, thinking it the very smallest grade she had ever seen.

“This is the whole school,” said the teacher. “There are only two or three in each class. You’ll probably have three in yours. Miss Ann said you were in the third grade. There, that’s your seat.”

Elizabeth sat down before a very old desk, much battered and hacked up with knife marks. There was a big H. P. carved just over the inkwell, and many other initials scattered all over the top.

The teacher stepped back to her desk and took up a violin that lay there. “Now, children, we’ll begin the afternoon session by singing ‘America,’” she said. She played the air over a little very sweetly and stirringly, and then as the children stood up she came down close to them, standing just in front of Betsy. She drew the bow across the strings in a big chord, and said, “Now,” and Betsy burst into song with the others. The sun came in the windows brightly, the teacher, too, sang as she played, and all the children, even the littlest ones, opened their mouths wide and sang lustily.

CHAPTER V
WHAT GRADE IS BETSY?

After the singing the teacher gave Elizabeth Ann a pile of schoolbooks, some paper, some pencils, and a pen, and told her to set her desk in order. There were more initials carved inside, another big H. P. with a little A. P. under it. What a lot of children must have sat there, thought the little girl as she arranged her books and papers. As she shut down the lid the teacher finished giving some instructions to three or four little ones and said, “Betsy and Ralph and Ellen, bring your reading books up here.”

Betsy sighed, took out her third-grade reader, and went with the other two up to the battered old bench near the teacher’s desk. She knew all about reading lessons and she hated them, although she loved to read. But reading lessons...! You sat with your book open at some reading that you could do with your eyes shut, it was so easy, and you waited and waited and waited while your classmates slowly stumbled along, reading aloud a sentence or two apiece, until your turn came to stand up and read your sentence or two, which by that time sounded just like nonsense because you’d read it over and over so many times to yourself before your chance came. And often you didn’t even have a chance to do that, because the teacher didn’t have time to get around to you at all, and you closed your book and put it back in your desk without having opened your mouth. Reading was one thing Elizabeth Ann had learned to do very well indeed, but she had learned it all by herself at home from much reading to herself. Aunt Frances had kept her well supplied with children’s books from the nearest public library. She often read three a week—very different, that, from a sentence or two once or twice a week.

When she sat down on the battered old bench she almost laughed aloud, it seemed so funny to be in a class of only three. There had been forty in her grade in the big brick building. She sat in the middle, the little girl whom the teacher had called Ellen on one side, and Ralph on the other. Ellen was very pretty, with fair hair smoothly braided in two little pig-tails, sweet, blue eyes, and a clean blue-and-white gingham dress. Ralph had very black eyes, dark hair, a big bruise on his forehead, a cut on his chin, and a tear in the knee of his short trousers. He was much bigger than Ellen, and Elizabeth Ann thought he looked rather fierce. She decided that she would be afraid of him, and would not like him at all.

“Page thirty-two,” said the teacher. “Ralph first.”

Ralph stood up and began to read. It sounded very familiar to Elizabeth Ann, for he did not read at all well. What was not familiar was that the teacher did not stop him after the first sentence. He read on and on till he had read a page, the teacher only helping him with the hardest words.

“Now Betsy,” said the teacher.

Elizabeth Ann stood up, read the first sentence, and paused, like a caged lion pausing when he comes to the end of his cage.

“Go on,” said the teacher.

Elizabeth Ann read the next sentence and stopped again, automatically.

“Go on,” said the teacher, looking at her sharply.

The next time the little girl paused the teacher laughed out good-naturedly. “What is the matter with you, Betsy?” she said. “Go on till I tell you to stop.”

So Elizabeth Ann, very much surprised but very much interested, read on, sentence after sentence, till she forgot they were sentences and just thought of what they meant. She read a whole page and then another page, and that was the end of the selection. She had never read aloud so much in her life. She was aware that everybody in the room had stopped working to listen to her. She felt very proud and less afraid than she had ever thought she could be in a schoolroom. When she finished, “You read very well!” said the teacher. “Is this very easy for you?”

“Oh, yes!” said Elizabeth Ann.

“I guess, then, that you’d better not stay in this class,” said the teacher. She took a book out of her desk. “See if you can read that.”

Elizabeth Ann began in her usual school-reading style, very slow and monotonous, but this didn’t seem like a “reader” at all. It was poetry, full of hard words that were fun to try to pronounce, and it was all about an old woman who would hang out an American flag, even though the town was full of rebel soldiers. She read faster and faster, getting more and more excited, till she broke out with “Halt!” in such a loud, spirited voice that the sound of it startled her and made her stop, fearing that she would be laughed at. But nobody laughed. They were all listening, very eagerly, even the little ones, with their eyes turned toward her.

“You might as well go on and let us see how it came out,” said the teacher, and Betsy finished triumphantly.

“Well,” said the teacher, “there’s no sense in your reading along in the third reader. After this you’ll recite out of the seventh reader with Frank and Harry and Stashie.”

Elizabeth Ann could not believe her ears. To be “jumped” four grades in that casual way! It wasn’t possible! She at once thought, however, of something that would prevent it entirely, and while Ellen was reading her page in a slow, careful little voice, Elizabeth Ann was feeling miserably that she must explain to the teacher why she couldn’t read with the seventh-grade children. Oh, how she wished she could! When they stood up to go back to their seats she hesitated, hung her head, and looked very unhappy. “Did you want to say something to me?” asked the teacher, pausing with a bit of chalk in her hand.

The little girl went up to her desk and said, what she knew it was her duty to confess: “I can’t be allowed to read in the seventh reader. I don’t write a bit well, and I never get the mental number-work right. I couldn’t do ANYthing with seventh-grade arithmetic!”

The teacher looked a little blank and said: “I didn’t say anything about your number-work! I don’t know anything about it! You haven’t recited yet.” She turned away and began to write a list of words on the board. “Betsy, Ralph, and Ellen study their spelling,” she said. “You little ones come up for your reading.”

Two little boys and two little girls came forward as Elizabeth Ann began to con over the words on the board. At first she found she was listening to the little, chirping voices, as the children straggled with their reading, instead of studying “doubt, travel, cheese,” and the other words in her lesson. But she put her hands over her ears, and her mind on her spelling. She wanted to make a good impression with that lesson. After a while, when she was sure she could spell them all correctly, she began to listen and look around her. She always “got” her spelling in less time than was allowed the class, and usually sat idle, looking out of the window until that study period was over. But now the moment she stopped staring at the board and moving her lips as she spelled to herself the teacher said, just as though she had been watching her every minute instead of conducting a class, “Betsy, have you learned your spelling?”

“Yes, ma’am, I think so,” said Elizabeth Ann, wondering very much why she was asked.

“That’s fine,” said the teacher. “I wish you’d take little Molly over in that corner and help her with her reading. She’s getting on so much better than the rest of the class that I hate to have her lose her time. Just hear her read the rest of her little story, will you, and don’t help her unless she’s really stuck.”

Elizabeth Ann was startled by this request, which was unheard of in her experience. She was very uncertain of herself as she sat down on a low chair in the corner of the schoolroom away from the desks, with the little child leaning on her knee. And yet she was not exactly afraid, either, because Molly was such a shy little roly-poly thing, with her crop of yellow curls, and her bright blue eyes very serious as she looked hard at the book and began: “Once there was a rat. It was a fat rat.” No, it was impossible to be frightened of such a funny little girl, who peered so earnestly into the older child’s face to make sure she was doing her lesson right.

Elizabeth Ann had never had anything to do with children younger than herself, and she felt very pleased and important to have anybody look up to her! She put her arm around Molly’s square, warm, fat little body and gave her a squeeze. Molly snuggled up closer; and the two children put their heads together over the printed page, Elizabeth Ann correcting Molly very gently indeed when she made a mistake, and waiting patiently when she hesitated. She had so fresh in her mind her own suffering from quick, nervous corrections that she took the greatest pleasure in speaking quietly and not interrupting the little girl more than was necessary. It was fun to teach, lots of fun! She was surprised when the teacher said, “Well, Betsy, how did Molly do?”

“Oh, is the time up?” said Elizabeth Ann. “Why, she does beautifully, I think, for such a little thing.”

“Do you suppose,” said the teacher thoughtfully, just as though Betsy were a grown-up person, “do you suppose she could go into the second reader, with Eliza? There’s no use keeping her in the first if she’s ready to go on.”

Elizabeth Ann’s head whirled with this second light-handed juggling with the sacred distinction between the grades. In the big brick schoolhouse nobody ever went into another grade except at the beginning of a new year, after you’d passed a lot of examinations. She had not known that anybody could do anything else. The idea that everybody took a year to a grade, no matter what! was so fixed in her mind that she felt as though the teacher had said: “How would you like to stop being nine years old and be twelve instead! And don’t you think Molly would better be eight instead of six?”

However, just then her class in arithmetic was called, so that she had no more time to be puzzled. She came forward with Ralph and Ellen again, very low in her mind. She hated arithmetic with all her might, and she really didn’t understand a thing about it! By long experience she had learned to read her teachers’ faces very accurately, and she guessed by their expression whether the answer she gave was the right one. And that was the only way she could tell. You never heard of any other child who did that, did you?

They had mental arithmetic, of course (Elizabeth Ann thought it just her luck!), and of course it was those hateful eights and sevens, and of course right away poor Betsy got the one she hated most, 7x8. She never knew that one! She said dispiritedly that it was 54, remembering vaguely that it was somewhere in the fifties. Ralph burst out scornfully, “56!” and the teacher, as if she wanted to take him down for showing off, pounced on him with 9 x 8. He answered, without drawing breath, 72. Elizabeth Ann shuddered at his accuracy. Ellen, too, rose to the occasion when she got 6 x 7, which Elizabeth Ann could sometimes remember and sometimes not. And then, oh horrors! It was her turn again! Her turn had never before come more than twice during a mental arithmetic lesson. She was so startled by the swiftness with which the question went around that she balked on 6 x 6, which she knew perfectly. And before she could recover Ralph had answered and had rattled out a 108 in answer to 9 x 12; and then Ellen slapped down an 84 on top of 7 x 12. Good gracious! Who could have guessed, from the way they read, they could do their tables like this! She herself missed on 7 x 7 and was ready to cry. After this the teacher didn’t call on her at all, but showered questions down on the other two, who sent the answers back with sickening speed.

After the lesson the teacher said, smiling, “Well, Betsy, you were right about your arithmetic. I guess you’d better recite with Eliza for a while. She’s doing second-grade work. I shouldn’t be surprised if, after a good review with her, you’d be able to go on with the third-grade work.”

Elizabeth Ann fell back on the bench with her mouth open. She felt really dizzy. What crazy things the teacher said! She felt as though she was being pulled limb from limb.

“What’s the matter?” asked the teacher, seeing her bewildered face.

“Why—why,” said Elizabeth Ann, “I don’t know what I am at all. If I’m second-grade arithmetic and seventh-grade reading and third-grade spelling, what grade am I?”

The teacher laughed at the turn of her phrase. “you aren’t any grade at all, no matter where you are in school. You’re just yourself, aren’t you? What difference does it make what grade you’re in! And what’s the use of your reading little baby things too easy for you just because you don’t know your multiplication table?”

“Well, for goodness’ sakes!” ejaculated Elizabeth Ann, feeling very much as though somebody had stood her suddenly on her head.

“Why, what’s the matter?” asked the teacher again.

This time Elizabeth Ann didn’t answer, because she herself didn’t know what the matter was. But I do, and I’ll tell you. The matter was that never before had she known what she was doing in school. She had always thought she was there to pass from one grade to another, and she was ever so startled to get a little glimpse of the fact that she was there to learn how to read and write and cipher and generally use her mind, so she could take care of herself when she came to be grown-up. Of course, she didn’t really know that till she did come to be grown-up, but she had her first dim notion of it in that moment, and it made her feel the way you do when you’re learning to skate and somebody pulls away the chair you’ve been leaning on and says, “Now, go it alone!”

The teacher waited a minute, and then, when Elizabeth Ann didn’t say anything more, she rang a little bell. “Recess time,” she said, and as the children marched out and began putting on their wraps she followed them into the cloak-room, pulled on a warm, red cap and a red sweater, and ran outdoors herself. “Who’s on my side!” she called, and the children came darting out after her. Elizabeth Ann had dreaded the first recess time with the strange children, but she had no time to feel shy, for in a twinkling she was on one end of a long rope with a lot of her schoolmates, pulling with all her might against the teacher and two of the big boys. Nobody had looked at her curiously, nobody had said anything to her beyond a loud, “Come on, Betsy!” from Ralph, who was at the head on their side.

They pulled and they pulled, digging their feet into the ground and bracing themselves against the rocks which stuck up out of the playground. Sometimes the teacher’s side yanked them along by quick jerks, and then they’d all set their feet hard when Ralph shouted out, “Now, all together!” and they’d slowly drag the other side back. And all the time everybody was shouting and yelling together with the excitement. Betsy was screaming too, and when a wagon passing by stopped and a big, broad-shouldered farmer jumped down laughing, put the end of the rope over his shoulder, and just walked off with the whole lot of them till he had pulled them clear off their feet, Elizabeth Ann found herself rolling over and over with a breathless, squirming mass of children, her shrill laughter rising even above the shouts of merriment of the others. She laughed so she could hardly get up on her feet again, it was such an unexpected ending to the contest.

The big farmer was laughing too. “You ain’t so smart as you think you are, are you!” he jeered at them good-naturedly. Then he started, yelling “Whoa there!” to his horses, which had begun to walk on. He had to run after them with all his might, and just climbed into the back of the wagon and grabbed the reins the very moment they broke into a trot. The children laughed, and Ralph shouted after him, “Hi, there, Uncle Nate! Who’s not so smart as he thinks he is, now!” He turned to the little girls near him. “They ’most got away from him that time!” he said. “He’s awful foolish about leaving them standing while he’s funning or something. He thinks he’s awful funny, anyhow. Some day they’ll run away on him and then where’ll he be?”

Elizabeth Ann was thinking to herself that this was one of the queerest things that had happened to her even in this queer place. Never, why never once, had any grown-up, passing the playground of the big brick building, dreamed of such a thing as stopping for a minute to play. They never even looked at the children, any more than if they were in another world. In fact she had felt the school was in another world.

“Ralph, it’s your turn to get the water,” said the teacher, handing him a pail. “Want to go along?” said Ralph gruffly to Ellen and Betsy. He led the way and the little girls walked after him. Now that she was out of a crowd Elizabeth Ann felt all her shyness come down on her like a black cloud, drying up her mouth and turning her hands and feet cold as ice. Into one of these cold hands she felt small, warm fingers slide. She looked down and there was little Molly trotting by her side, turning her blue eyes up trustfully. “Teacher says I can go with you if you’ll take care of me,” she said. “She never lets us first-graders go without somebody bigger to help us over the log.”

As she spoke they came to a small, clear, swift brook, crossed by a big white-birch log. Elizabeth Ann was horribly afraid to set foot on it, but with little Molly’s hand holding tightly to hers she was ashamed to say she was afraid. Ralph skipped across, swinging the pail to show how easy it was for him. Ellen followed more slowly, and then—oh, don’t you wish Aunt Frances could have been there!—Betsy shut her teeth together hard, put Molly ahead of her, took her hand, and started across. As a matter of fact Molly went along as sure-footed as a little goat, having done it a hundred times, and it was she who steadied Elizabeth Ann. But nobody knew this, Molly least of all.

Ralph took a drink out of a tin cup standing on a stump near by, dipped the pail into a deep, clear pool, and started back to the school. Ellen took a drink and offered the cup to Betsy, very shyly, without looking up. After they had all three had a drink they stood there for a moment, much embarrassed. Then Ellen said, in a very small voice, “Do you like dolls with yellow hair the best?”

Now it happened that Elizabeth Ann had very positive convictions on this point which she had never spoken of, because Aunt Frances didn’t really care about dolls. She only pretended to, to be company for her little niece.

“No, I don’t!” answered the little girl emphatically. “I get just sick and tired of always seeing them with that old, bright-yellow hair! I like them to have brown hair, just the way most little girls really do!”

Ellen lifted her eyes and smiled radiantly. “Oh, so do I!” she said. “And that lovely old doll your folks have has got brown hair. Will you let me play with her some time?”

“My folks?” said Elizabeth Ann blankly.

“Why yes, your Aunt Abigail and your Uncle Henry.”

“Have they got a doll?” said Betsy, thinking this was the very climax of Putney queerness.

“Oh my, yes!” said Molly, eagerly. “She’s the one Mrs. Putney had when she was a little girl. And she’s got the loveliest clothes! She’s in the hair-trunk under the eaves in the attic. They let me take her down once when I was there with Mother. And Mother said she guessed, now a little girl had come there to live, they’d let her have her down all the time. I’ll bring mine over next Saturday, if you want me to. Mine’s got yellow hair, but she’s real pretty anyhow. If Father’s going to mill that day, he can leave me there for the morning.”

Elizabeth Ann had not understood more than one word in five of this, but just then the school-bell rang and they went back, little Molly helping Elizabeth Ann over the log and thinking she was being helped, as before.

They ran along to the little building, and there I’m going to leave them, because I think I’ve told enough about their school for one while. It was only a poor, rough, little district school anyway, that no Superintendent of Schools would have looked at for a minute, except to sniff.

CHAPTER VI
IF YOU DON’T LIKE CONVERSATION IN A BOOK SKIP THIS CHAPTER!

Betsy opened the door and was greeted by her kitten, who ran to her, purring and arching her back to be stroked.

“Well,” said Aunt Abigail, looking up from the pan of apples in her lap, “I suppose you’re starved, aren’t you? Get yourself a piece of bread and butter, why don’t you? and have one of these apples.”

As the little girl sat down by her, munching fast on this provender, she asked: “What desk did you get?”

Elizabeth Ann thought for a moment, cuddling Eleanor up to her face. “I think it is the third from the front in the second row.” She wondered why Aunt Abigail cared. “Oh, I guess that’s your Uncle Henry’s desk. It’s the one his father had, too. Are there a couple of H. P.’s carved on it?”

Betsy nodded.

“His father carved the H. P. on the lid, so Henry had to put his inside. I remember the winter he put it there. It was the first season Mother let me wear real hoop skirts. I sat in the first seat on the third row.”

Betsy ate her apple more and more slowly, trying to take in what Aunt Abigail had said. Uncle Henry and his father—why Moses or Alexander the Great didn’t seem any further back in the mists of time to Elizabeth Ann than did Uncle Henry’s father! And to think he had been a little boy, right there at that desk! She stopped chewing altogether for a moment and stared into space. Although she was only nine years old, she was feeling a little of the same rapt wonder, the same astonished sense of the reality of the people who have gone before, which make a first visit to the Roman Forum such a thrilling event for grown-ups. That very desk!

After a moment she came to herself, and finding some apple still in her mouth, went on chewing meditatively. “Aunt Abigail,” she said, “how long ago was that?”

“Let’s see,” said the old woman, peeling apples with wonderful rapidity. “I was born in 1844. And I was six when I first went to school. That’s sixty-six years ago.”

Elizabeth Ann, like all little girls of nine, had very little notion how long sixty-six years might be. “Was George Washington alive then?” she asked.

The wrinkles around Aunt Abigail’s eyes deepened mirthfully, but she did not laugh as she answered, “No, that was long after he died, but the schoolhouse was there when he was alive.”

“It was!” said Betsy, staring, with her teeth set deep in an apple.

“Yes, indeed. It was the first house in the valley built of sawed lumber. You know, when our folks came up here, they had to build all their houses of logs to begin with.”

“They did!” cried Betsy, with her mouth full of apple.

“Why yes, child, what else did you suppose they had to make houses out of? They had to have something to live in, right off. The sawmills came later.”

“I didn’t know anything about it,” said Betsy. “Tell me about it.”

“Why you knew, didn’t you—your Aunt Harriet must have told you—about how our folks came up here from Connecticut in 1763, on horseback! Connecticut was an old settled place then, compared to Vermont. There wasn’t anything here but trees and bears and wood-pigeons. I’ve heard ’em say that the wood-pigeons were so thick you could go out after dark and club ’em out of the trees, just like hens roosting in a hen-house. There always was cold pigeon-pie in the pantry, just the way we have doughnuts. And they used bear-grease to grease their boots and their hair, bears were so plenty. It sounds like good eating, don’t it! But of course that was just at first. It got quite settled up before long, and by the time of the Revolution, bears were getting pretty scarce, and soon the wood-pigeons were all gone.”

“And the schoolhouse—that schoolhouse where I went today—was that built then?” Elizabeth Ann found it hard to believe.

“Yes, it used to have a great big chimney and fireplace in it. It was built long before stoves were invented, you know.”

“Why, I thought stoves were always invented!” cried Elizabeth Ann. This was the most startling and interesting conversation she had ever taken part in.

Aunt Abigail laughed. “Mercy, no, child! Why, I can remember when only folks that were pretty well off had stoves and real poor people still cooked over a hearth fire. I always thought it a pity they tore down the big chimney and fireplace out of the schoolhouse and put in that big, ugly stove. But folks are so daft over new-fangled things. Well, anyhow, they couldn’t take away the sun-dial on the window-sill. You want to be sure to look at that. It’s on the sill of the middle window on the right hand as you face the teacher’s desk.”

“Sun-dial,” repeated Betsy. “What’s that?”

“Why to tell the time by, when—”

“Why didn’t they have a clock?” asked the child.

Aunt Abigail laughed. “Good gracious, there was only one clock in the valley for years and years, and that belonged to the Wardons, the rich people in the village. Everybody had sun-dials cut in their window-sills. There’s one on the window-sill of our pantry this minute. Come on, I’ll show it to you.” She got up heavily with her pan of apples, and trotted briskly, shaking the floor as she went, over to the stove. “But first just watch me put these on to cook so you’ll know how.” She set the pan on the stove, poured some water from the tea-kettle over the apples, and put on a cover. “Now come on into the pantry.”

They entered a sweet-smelling, spicy little room, all white paint, and shelves which were loaded with dishes and boxes and bags and pans of milk and jars of preserves.

“There!” said Aunt Abigail, opening the window. “That’s not so good as the one at school. This only tells when noon is.”

Elizabeth Ann stared stupidly at the deep scratch on the window-sill.

“Don’t you see?” said Aunt Abigail. “When the shadow got to that mark it was noon. And the rest of the time you guessed by how far it was from the mark. Let’s see if I can come anywhere near it now.” She looked at it hard and said: “I guess it’s half-past four.” She glanced back into the kitchen at the clock and said: “Oh pshaw! It’s ten minutes past five! Now my grandmother could have told that within five minutes, just by the place of the shadow. I declare! Sometimes it seems to me that every time a new piece of machinery comes into the door some of our wits fly out at the window! Now I couldn’t any more live without matches than I could fly! And yet they all used to get along all right before they had matches. Makes me feel foolish to think I’m not smart enough to get along, if I wanted to, without those little snips of pine and brimstone. Here, Betsy, take a cooky. It’s against my principles to let a child leave the pantry without having a cooky. My! it does seem like living again to have a young one around to stuff!”

Betsy took the cooky, but went on with the conversation by exclaiming, “How could any-body get along without matches? You have to have matches.”

Aunt Abigail didn’t answer at first. They were back in the kitchen now. She was looking at the clock again. “See here,” she said; “it’s time I began getting supper ready. We divide up on the work. Ann gets the dinner and I get the supper. And everybody gets his own breakfast. Which would you rather do, help Ann with the dinner, or me with the supper?”

Elizabeth Ann had not had the slightest idea of helping anybody with any meal, but, confronted unexpectedly with the alternative offered, she made up her mind so quickly that she didn’t want to help Cousin Ann, and declared so loudly, “Oh, help you with the supper!” that her promptness made her sound quite hearty and willing. “Well, that’s fine,” said Aunt Abigail. “We’ll set the table now. But first you would better look at that apple sauce. I hear it walloping away as though it was boiling too fast. Maybe you’d better push it back where it won’t cook so fast. There are the holders, on that hook.”

Elizabeth Ann approached the stove with the holder in her hand and horror in her heart. Nobody had ever dreamed of asking her to handle hot things. She looked around dismally at Aunt Abigail, but the old woman was standing with her back turned, doing something at the kitchen table. Very gingerly the little girl took hold of the handle of the saucepan, and very gingerly she shoved it to the back of the stove. And then she stood still a moment to admire herself. She could do that as well as anybody!

“Why,” said Aunt Abigail, as if remembering that Betsy had asked her a question. “Any man could strike a spark from his flint and steel that he had for his gun. And he’d keep striking it till it happened to fly out in the right direction, and you’d catch it in some fluff where it would start a smoulder, and you’d blow on it till you got a little flame, and drop tiny bits of shaved-up dry pine in it, and so, little by little, you’d build your fire up.”

“But it must have taken forEVER to do that!”

“Oh, you didn’t have to do that more than once in ever so long,” said Aunt Abigail, briskly. She interrupted her story to say: “Now you put the silver around, while I cream the potatoes. It’s in that drawer—a knife, a fork, and two spoons for each place—and the plates and cups are up there behind the glass doors. We’re going to have hot cocoa again tonight.” And as the little girl, hypnotized by the other’s casual, offhand way of issuing instructions, began to fumble with the knives and forks she went on: “Why, you’d start your fire that way, and then you’d never let it go out. Everybody that amounted to anything knew how to bank the hearth fire with ashes at night so it would be sure to last. And the first thing in the morning, you got down on your knees and poked the ashes away very carefully till you got to the hot coals. Then you’d blow with the bellows and drop in pieces of dry pine—don’t forget the water-glasses—and you’d blow gently till they flared up and the shavings caught, and there your fire would be kindled again. The napkins are in the second drawer.”

Betsy went on setting the table, deep in thought, reconstructing the old life. As she put the napkins around she said, “But sometimes it must have gone out ...”

“Yes,” said Aunt Abigail, “sometimes it went out, and then one of the children was sent over to the nearest neighbor to borrow some fire. He’d take a covered iron pan fastened on to a long hickory stick, and go through the woods—everything was woods then—to the next house and wait till they had their fire going and could spare him a pan full of coals; and then—don’t forget the salt and pepper—he would leg it home as fast as he could streak it, to get there before the coals went out. Say, Betsy, I think that apple sauce is ready to be sweetened. You do it, will you? I’ve got my hands in the biscuit dough. The sugar’s in the left-hand drawer in the kitchen cabinet.”

“Oh, my!” cried Betsy, dismayed. “I don’t know how to cook!”

Aunt Abigail laughed and put back a strand of curly white hair with the back of her floury hand. “You know how to stir sugar into your cup of cocoa, don’t you?”

“But how much shall I put in?” asked Elizabeth Ann, clamoring for exact instruction so she wouldn’t need to do any thinking for herself.

“Oh, till it tastes right,” said Aunt Abigail, carelessly. “Fix it to suit yourself, and I guess the rest of us will like it. Take that big spoon to stir it with.”

Elizabeth Ann took off the lid and began stirring in sugar, a teaspoonful at a time, but she soon saw that that made no impression. She poured in a cupful, stirred it vigorously, and tasted it. Better, but not quite enough. She put in a tablespoonful more and tasted it, staring off into space under bended brows as she concentrated her attention on the taste. It was quite a responsibility to prepare the apple sauce for a family. It was ever so good, too. But maybe a little more sugar. She put in a teaspoonful and decided it was just exactly right!

“Done?” asked Aunt Abigail. “Take it off, then, and pour it out in that big yellow bowl, and put it on the table in front of your place. You’ve made it; you ought to serve it.”

“It isn’t done, is it?” asked Betsy. “That isn’t all you do to make apple sauce!”

“What else could you do?” asked Aunt Abigail.

“Well...!” said Elizabeth Ann, very much surprised. “I didn’t know it was so easy to cook!”

“Easiest thing in the world,” said Aunt Abigail gravely, with the merry wrinkles around her merry old eyes all creased up with silent fun.

When Uncle Henry came in from the barn, with old Shep at his heels, and Cousin Ann came down from upstairs, where her sewing-machine had been humming like a big bee, they were both duly impressed when told that Betsy had set the table and made the apple sauce. They pronounced it very good apple sauce indeed, and each sent his saucer back to the little girl for a second helping. She herself ate three saucerfuls. Her own private opinion was that it was the very best apple sauce ever made.

After supper was over and the dishes washed and wiped, Betsy helping with the putting-away, the four gathered around the big lamp on the table with the red cover. Cousin Ann was making some buttonholes in the shirt-waist she had constructed that afternoon, Aunt Abigail was darning socks, and Uncle Henry was mending a piece of harness. Shep lay on the couch and snored until he got so noisy they couldn’t stand it, and Cousin Ann poked him in the ribs and he woke up snorting and gurgling and looking around very sheepishly. Every time this happened it made Betsy laugh. She held Eleanor, who didn’t snore at all, but made the prettiest little tea-kettle-singing purr deep in her throat, and opened and sheathed her needle-like claws in Betsy’s dress.

“Well, how’d you get on at school?” asked Uncle Henry.

“I’ve got your desk,” said Elizabeth Ann, looking at him curiously, at his gray hair and wrinkled, weather-beaten face, and trying to think what he must have looked like when he was a little boy like Ralph.