Chapter III: Part 3

Mr. Thomas Craig, Elmhurst, Connecticut

Dear Mr. Craig: Your letter of March 28th received. I should be very
glad to rent the old house down at Stony Eddy on a lease, but do not
want to let it go out of the family. Miss Craig can tell you the
conditions under which it came into my possession and why I am not at
liberty to part with it. If you care to rent it at $65 a month, it is
yours. Any necessary repairs it may need I am willing to make. I have
never seen the property myself, but whatever Miss Craig says about it
will be satisfactory to me, as she was my Aunt Trowbridge’s dearest
friend.

Hoping if you decide to take the place, you may be happy there, I am,

Yours sincerely,
RALPH McRAE.

“It’s ours,” Jean breathed thankfully.

“I always felt that it was, somehow,” Mrs. Craig smiled happily around at her family. “And I know you’ll like it, Tom.”

“Oh, I know the place, I remember admiring it as a boy. Besides, I’d like anything up here. Why, I could live out yonder in Becky’s corncrib very comfortably this summer if she’d only let me,” teased the invalid. “Better send a check out at once for the rent, Margie, and get into it as soon as possible.”

It was the third week in April when they drove down in relays from Maple Grove and took possession of the new home. There had been considerable repairing to be done—painting and papering, mending the water pipes and furnace, and cleaning out the chimneys.

The goods had been brought up from Nantic by Matt in the big hay wagon in four trips. Mrs. Craig had wanted to hire a truck from Norwich, but Rebecca said it was all nonsense with two big horses standing idle in the barn just aching for work, and Matt fussing around over frost still being in the ground so he couldn’t do any deep ploughing. So the goods came up and were packed into the big front room downstairs while the girls and Mrs. Craig went back and forth settling.

Matt’s younger brother came to do the papering and painting. He looked exactly like a young rooster, Kit declared, all neck and legs, and he was fearfully shy. She found immediate diversion in appearing before him suddenly in her most abrupt manner to ask his opinion anxiously on something, whereupon Shad would blush intensely to the roots of his taffy-colored hair, and splash paste blindly.

His name was Shadrach Farnum, but Shad suited him to perfection. As Rebecca said, he did sort of run to bone. But he could paint and paper well, and gradually the rooms began to look different. The big living room was covered with a soft gray that harmonized well with their dark green and chartreuse upholstered furniture. The bookcases were painted the same shade of gray. Window seats were built around the two bay windows, and the girls worked hard making new chartreuse cushions and crisp white curtains for the windows.

“It looks so warm and friendly, doesn’t it?” Doris exclaimed when the big round table was brought in and the copper lamp placed in the center. The copper lamp was really an institution in the Craig family. The girls had given it personal conduct from the Cove on Long Island to Nantic. Jean had found it in an old copper and brass shop in New York at a wonderful reduction, and had carted it home herself in triumph. The bowl was broad and low and squat, shaped a good deal like a summer squash. The parchment shade was perforated by hand with exquisite artistry into strange Muscovite designs, through which the light shone softly. When it was lighted the first evening in the new home, Doris said she felt that everything was complete.

The day after they really moved in, Rebecca drove down with Ella Lou and some good advice, a large brown crock of freshly baked beans and a loaf of brown bread.

“You need a good safe horse that you all can ride and also use for work,” she said. “Sam Willetts has a brown mare that seems just about the ticket. I telephoned over to him this morning and he’ll sell her for $75, which isn’t bad at all. If you like, Margie, I’ll call him up again as soon as I get back and Buzzy Hancock can bring her over. Buzzy’s working for Mr. Willetts now, and the mare used to belong to the Hancocks. She was a regular pet, Sally said.”

Mrs. Craig was sure it was a good plan and Rebecca was instructed to close the bargain. So it was thus Woodhow made the acquaintance of Buzzy Hancock, destined to be a close friend before summer was over, and always a family standby.

It was a little while after supper when Buzzy rode up leading the mare behind his own horse, and they all went out to look at her. Buzzy was about seventeen and tall. He had rosy cheeks, blue eyes, curly brown hair, and dimples so deep that Doris said it was a burning shame to waste them on a boy.

He stood at the mare’s head, patting her slender, glossy neck and combing her mane with his fingers, telling the girls and Tommy her history, how she had belonged to Molly Bawn, their old mare, and how his father had broken her to harness himself.

“But she never had to be really broken in. Sally and I started riding her bareback when she was out in pasture and she was just as tame as a kitten. She understands anything you say to her. Mother hated to sell her to Mr. Willetts, but we had to, and as I was working for him, why, she didn’t know any difference. She’s used to a good deal of petting—”

“Oh, we’ll all pet her,” Jean promised. “We must get a saddle and harness. Do you know where we can get some?”

“Down at Mr. Butterick’s,” said Buzzy. “He’s the man who handles all sorts of riding equipment.”

“You have wonderful people up here,” Doris said fervently. “It seems as if whenever you want a certain kind of a person, there he is waiting for you. Where does Mr. Butterick live?”

“Down in Rocky Glen. Second house past the basket weaver, Mr. Tompkins.”

“Suppose we go over there tomorrow, kids,” Jean suggested. “Or do you have to take the mare over, Buzzy, and let Mr. Butterick sort of fit her with a harness and saddle? I wish I could put her in the barn right now.”

“Better get somebody to take care of her first,” Doris said practically. “We’d feed her fish cakes and doughnuts.”

Buzzy shifted his weight from one foot to the other uneasily.

“Don’t suppose you folks think of taking anybody on regularly, do you? Mother said I was to ask, and say if you wanted me I might come up. It’s nearer home than Mr. Willetts’ and there’s only Sally and Mom at home, and they need me to do the chores after I get home at night.”

Jean hastily glanced at Kit for fear she wouldn’t remember all that Rebecca had told them about Buzzy Hancock and his sister. But just then Mrs. Craig stepped out on the side porch and smiled at Buzzy until he turned red and grinned.

“I could come for about ten a month, Mother thought,” he added with much embarrassment.

Mrs. Craig thought ten was about right too, and Buzzy rode away in the spring twilight. All the way up the hill they heard him whistling _Stardust_. Although the deal had been closed over the brown mare, and the check reposed in Buzzy’s overalls’ pocket, he took her back with him, and promised to ride her over in the morning so the Craigs should not have the care of her overnight.

“I asked him what her name was,” Tommy said, “and he told me they just called her Molly’s Baby. We must think up a better name than that. You know, Mom, she looked over at me so wistfully when Buzzy said she would have to go back overnight. I know she wanted to stay with us.”

The next addition to the place was the lot of chickens. It had been agreed the first year that no large expenditures should be made for anything, because it was all more or less experimental.

“We want to take care of Dad, and make him well this first year,” Jean told the others up in their room one night.

At first the housework had proved to be the great stumbling block in the way of perfect peace and daily comfort.

“I tell you, Mom, if you’ll just say what you want done, we’ll do our best to oblige,” Jean had promised at the very beginning, but the girls had found themselves tangled up in less than two days, treading on each other’s heels and losing their tempers, too.

Mrs. Craig laughed at them when she happened in and found them all bickering.

“You’ll have to learn teamwork,” she explained. “You must learn that when you put your bread to rise it doesn’t shape itself into loaves and hop into the pans and walk over to the oven.” Here Kit blushed hotly, remembering how her first batch had risen to the occasion beyond all expectations, and rambled during the night all over the edge of the pan and the arm of the chair she had set it on. “And, Tommy, darling, if you catch mice in traps alive, and then decide to tame them, we’ll have mice all over the place.”

Tommy had discovered a nice little brown prisoner under the pantry shelf, had taken him out into the rose garden and there let him go, all in a spirit of pity that left Kit and Jean speechless.

Also, sundry noises having issued from his room at night, the girls had started down the dark hall to investigate, and had stepped on turtles which Tommy had found sunning themselves on logs in the pond, and had put into empty tomato cans and smuggled up to his room for future humanitarian reference.

“OK, Mom,” said Jean in a subdued voice, “we’ll try to make fewer mistakes. With patience maybe we’ll learn how to do housework with one hand. I told Kit to fix the bread a dozen times, but she wouldn’t listen.”

Just then Buzzy came to the kitchen door, bare-headed and smiling.

“Sally said for me to tell you folks that she heard Ma Parmelee had some good Plymouth Rocks for sale. They’re about as reliable a hen as you can get. Ma’s going to sell off everything and go to live with her son down in Nantic. It’s near toward where I live, if you’d like to drive over that way.”

Mrs. Craig thought it was a good idea, and that Jean could drive her over. Jean went into the living room to get the keys for the car from the desk and came back. She and Buzzy walked out to the garage for the car together.

As they walked along, Jean said, “I wish spring would hurry up and make up its mind to stay awhile.” Letters had come from some of the girls back at the Cove that day and she felt a wave of loneliness and half panic at what they had undertaken.

After Jean had backed the car out of the garage, Buzzy helped her to attach the new trailer. At the back door Jean tooted the horn and waited for her mother to join them. While they were waiting Buzzy loaded some burlap sacks into the trailer for the hens.

“Better tie them to something when you start off,” he advised. “They always flop around a lot in sacks.”

It was a drive of about two and a half miles, up through the hills. Each new road seemed to lead them straight up to the edge of the world and then to dip again and leave the clouds behind. The woods held a haze of green now that hung over the distant hills like a mist. Once a row of young quail blinked dizzily from a pasture bar and fled at the noise of the approaching car. And all at once there came the quick thud of hoofs from a lane at the right of them, and a young girl riding horseback waved for them to stop. She was about as old as Kit, with friendly blue eyes and brown hair brushed back from her face and fastened with a silver clasp at the nape of her neck.

“How do you do,” she said, blushing in a way that seemed familiar to them, for it reminded them of Buzzy. “I’m Sally Hancock.”

11. Jean Makes a Discovery

“Oh, we’re ever so glad to know you, Sally,” Jean said at once. “Buzzy’s told us all about you until we felt that we really did know you.”

Sally blushed deeper than ever, just as Buzzy did, and brushed a fly off her horse’s neck. She sat her horse well, in a pair of navy-blue riding breeches and a man’s shirt open at the throat. Altogether both Mrs. Craig and Jean approved of her at sight, for she seemed like a girl edition of Buzzy himself.

Sally told them they were on the right road, and to keep to the left after they passed the cemetery.

“I’m going down the other way or I’d ride along and show you where it is.”

“You must come down to see us when you can, please. We’re rather lonesome, since we’re quite new around here. Are there many boys and girls?”

“Quite a few,” said Sally. “And luckily there are just about as many girls as boys. The Swedish girls over on the old Ames place, and there are two French girls near us. Their father’s the carpenter, Mr. Chappelle. Etoile’s the older one and the little on they call Tony. I’ll be over to see you one of these days.”

“Isn’t she a darling, Mother?” Jean exclaimed when they drove on. “I do hope she’ll come down. Kit would be crazy about her.”

“Anybody would be,” agreed Mrs. Craig, still smiling. “You know, Jean, I think that you youngsters are going to find a special work up here that only you can do. A work among these boys and girls of our own neighborhood.”

“But, Mom, our own neighborhood up here means a radius of about ten miles.”

“Even so. Rebecca’s old doctor covers twenty miles and has been doing it for forty years. He knows all of the families as if he were a census taker.”

Jean thought for a minute. They were going up a long hill and she shifted into second. “There seem to be so few real American girls up here, Mother,” Jean began slowly. “I thought we’d find ever so many, but while I lived up at Maple Grove I rode around a good deal, and you’d be surprised how many foreigners are up here. Becky told me the reason. The old families die out, or the younger generation moves away to the towns, and the foreigners buy up the old homesteads cheaply.”

“Well, dear?”

“But, Mother, you don’t understand. There are all sorts. French Canadians, and a Swedish family, and a Polish family, and the old miller up the valley from us used to be a Prussian sailor. Then there are the real old families, of course—”

“Are you thinking of confining your circle of acquaintances to the old families, Jeannie?”

Jean laughed at the amusement in her mother’s voice.

“Of course not, Mom. Still I suppose we must be careful just moving into a new place like this. We don’t want to get intimate with everybody. You’ll like _some_ of the old families.”

“I think I’ll like some of the new ones too. Have you noticed, Jean, in driving around, that the houses which are mostly unpainted and rather run-down-looking belong to the old timers, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, probably of first settlers?”

“Oh, Mother, there are some of the most interesting stories about them too, how they came out—walked, actually walked most of them—from the Massachusetts Bay Colony when there was some sort of a breakup, and a few dropped off here, and a few there, and they settled in villages wherever they happened to stop. I found a cemetery in the woods near Becky’s, with old slate gravestones, and dates away back to 1717.”

“I’d like to see them, dear, but at the same time they were foreigners too, or children of foreigners, immigrants from a far land. Can’t you understand what I mean? These newer families are like new blood to the country. It takes only a couple of generations to blend them in, Jean, and they bring new strength to us. Think what we get from the different nations. I remember out in California I had a wonderful girl friend whose people had been Polish exiles. That was a strange group of exiles who sought a haven in our land. There was Sienkiewicz, the great novelist, and many whose names I forget. Wanda was my girl friend’s name and my mother and aunts didn’t like me to be so friendly toward her because she was a foreigner, completely forgetting that they themselves had come from foreign extraction. I think that you children are very fortunate to be born in an age when these queer old earth lines, these race barriers, are being torn down and the idea of one world is coming forth. Up here in our lonely hills, we are going to face this same problem that all nations are coping with, and we in our small way can help open the gates of the future.”

“Why, Mother, I never heard you talk this way before,” Jean exclaimed. “You always seemed just sweet and feminine. I—why, somehow I never felt you were interested in such things.”

“If we mothers are not interested in them, who should be?” she asked, her eyes full of a beautiful tenderness and compassion. “And you are going to do your share right here in Elmhurst, making a circle that shall join together the hands of all these boys and girls from different races. We’ll give a party soon and get acquainted with them all. Now let’s pay attention to chickens, for I think this must be the house.”

Jean turned into a side drive leading around to a house that stood well back from the road. As Jean said afterwards, the house looked as if it had been outdoors all its life, it was so weatherbeaten and gray. “Ma” Parmelee bustled out to meet them, plump and busy as one of her own Plymouth Rocks.

“Twelve pullets and one rooster you want?” she said. “Well, I guess I can fix you up. I heard you folks had moved in down yonder.” She led the way out to the big barn, followed by the chickens. The great doors were wide open, and the barn floor was covered lightly with wisps of hay. “Ma” scattered a measure of grain over this, and let the hens scratch for it.

“I have to work hard for what I get, and they ought to, too,” she said pleasantly. “Now, we’ll take any that you like and put them into bags. I’m going to sell you my very best rooster. His name’s Jim Dandy and he’s all of that. He’s pure Rhode Island Red, and two years old. You don’t have to worry about hawks when he’s around.”

After the chickens were all safely in the bags and put into the trailer, “Ma” waved goodbye and told them not to forget the Finnish family that was moving into her house.

“I’m going to live with my married daughter, and these poor things don’t know a living soul up here. Do drive over and speak to them as neighbors. There’s a man and his widowed sister and her children. All God’s folks, you know.”

“Finns,” murmured Jean speculatively, as they drove away. “There’s a new blend to our community, Mom. I’ve always wanted to know someone from the Scandinavian countries and Sally told me there is a Swedish family here too.”

Spring seemed to descend on the land all at once in the next few days, as if she had quite made up her mind to come and sit awhile, Becky said. One day the earth still looked windswept and bare, and the next there seemed to be a green sheen over the land and the woods looked hazy and lacy with the delicate budding leaves.

One night as Doris was out shutting up the hen houses and filling the pigeons’ pan with water, she stopped short, her head upraised eagerly like a fawn, listening to a new sound away off along the edges of the woods and deep down in the lower meadow where the brook flowed. It sounded keenest and sweetest over where the waters of the lake above the old dam moved with soft low lapping among the reeds and water grasses. Here it became a curiously shrill trilling noise, subdued and yet insistent like the strumming of muffled strings on a million tiny harps.

“It’s the peep frogs,” called Buzzy, coming up from the barn with Buttercup’s creamy contribution to the family. “They’re just waking up. That means it’s spring for sure.”

“Isn’t it cute of them to try to tell us all about it,” Doris cried delightedly, and away she ran to the house to insist that Kit and Jean and Tommy come out and listen too. In the twilight they walked around the terraces below the porch. Once Doris stopped below their father’s window to call up to him.

Day by day they would assure each other of his returning strength and health. The country air and utter restfulness of life as it ran here in channels of peace were surely giving him back at least the power to relax and rest. He slept as soundly as Tommy, all night long, something he had not been able to do in months, and his appetite was really getting to be quite encouraging.

Sally paid her promised visit within a few days, and from her the girls and Tommy received their first real information about the other neighbors around Elmhurst.

Buzzy was ploughing up the kitchen garden behind the house and Jean, with Sally at her side, sat on the low stone wall that separated it from the orchard, poring over a seed catalogue.

“I’d love some zinnias and snapdragons and blue delphiniums in big beds along the terraces,” she said. “Think of the splashes of blue up against those pines, girls. Remember the Jefferies’ place back at the Cove. Mrs. Jefferies paid her gardener a hundred dollars a month.”

“You’ll like the rare, rich red of radishes and beets and scarlet runner beans better,” Sally declared merrily. “We always lay out money on the food seeds first and then what’s left can go for flowers. Anyhow, when you’ve got heaps of roses and snowballs and syringas and lilacs and things that keep coming up by themselves every year, you don’t need to buy very much. Did you find the lilies of the valley down along the north wall? Mother says they used to be beautiful when she was a girl.”

The girls were silent, remembering what Rebecca had told them of the romance of Luella Trowbridge. But Tommy’s curiosity got the better of his caution and he coaxed Sally away to hunt for the lilies of the valley hidden away under the hazel bushes.

It was Sally, too, who took them up the hill to the rocky sheep pasture and showed them where arbutus bloomed around the edges of the gray, mossy rocks. And it was Sally, who pointed out to them the wintergreen, or checkerberry, as she called it, with its tiny pungent berries.

“She’s perfectly wonderful,” Kit declared that day at lunch. “She knows the exact spot in this entire township where every single flower bobs up in its season. We found saxifrage at the base of an old oak, and white trillium and bloodroot, and perfect fields of bluets. And she wouldn’t let us pick many either, only a few. She says it’s just as cruel to rob a patch of wild flowers of all chance of blooming again next year as it is to rob birds’ nests.”

Here Doris chimed in.

“And she’s going to teach me how to start a flower calendar. Not in a book, Mom. We’re going to take some of that monk’s cloth and mount specimens on it, then make a folio with leather covers of dyed sheepskin.”

“Sally seems to be a regular dynamo for starting activities,” said Mrs. Craig amusedly.

“She is just exactly that,” Kit answered earnestly. “I never met a girl with so many ideas up her sleeve. And they’re as poor as churchmice. Sally told us so herself. And here she is, cooped up in Elmhurst without any outlet at all. She knows what she wants to do, but we girls can tell her how to do it.”

“Sally’s going to peddle our rhubarb for us,” Kit went on. “I think that rhubarb is a most wonderful plant. It seems to spring up everywhere and pay compound interest on itself every year. I found a lot of it growing and thought it was peonies or dahlias, but Sally told me it was rhubarb, and we’re going to market it. She says there’s a big cranberry bog on this place too, away off in some sunken meadows above the dam, and we must look out because somebody comes and picks them without asking anything at all about it. So we’re going to watch the old wood road that turns into the sunken meadows. We can see it, Mom, from the window over the kitchen sink, and heaven help anybody who takes our cranberries!”

“I wouldn’t start looking for him yet awhile, dear. Cranberries won’t be along until frost,” laughed Mrs. Craig.

Tommy, with Buzzy’s help, was devoting himself to the hens. Although they had come rather late, still quite a few were setting, and Tommy had several almanacs and calendars marked with the dates of the “coming offs,” as Buzzy put it. Then there were about twenty tiny balls of fluff in the brooder from Rebecca’s incubator, and over these Tommy fussed and wasted more sentiment than any chickens deserved.

One of “Ma” Parmelee’s pullets had turned out to be a vagrant. Never would she stay with the rest of the chickens in the hen house or yard, or even around the barnyard. She was jet black and very peculiar. At feeding time she would show up, but hover around the outskirts of the flock and nibble at kernels of corn anxiously.

Jean named her “Hamlet” in fun, because she said she was always looking for “rats in the arras.” But her real name was Gypsy. It was agreed that Gypsy had no idea of her natural obligation to society at all, that she didn’t have the slightest intention of setting on any eggs, in fact that she didn’t even have the gratitude to lay any eggs. All she did was appear promptly at mealtime and eat her share.

“There’ll be Gypsy a la Reine one of these fine Sundays,” Kit prophesied darkly, but Tommy begged for her life. In fact, whenever chicken was on the bill-of-fare Tommy always begged off any of his flock from execution, and Buzzy had to go to one of the neighboring farms and buy one.

“It seems so awful to eat a chicken that you’re well-acquainted with,” Tommy explained. “And another thing, Mom, did you know that the boys set traps around? Not now, but in the fall. At least, I think it’s in the fall. I had Buzzy paint me some signs on shingles and I’m going to put them all over the place.”

“What do they say, dear?”

“They say just this.” Tommy’s tone was full of firmness and decision. “_Any traps set on this property will be sprung by_ ME.”

“Do they state who ‘Me’ is?”

“I signed it with Dad’s name, and put underneath ‘Per T.’”

The screen door slammed and Kit walked into the living room from the porch. “Good night, everybody,” she said. “The night is yet young, but I’ve promised Buzzy—or rather, Buzzy and I have a bet that I can’t get up at five and help weed the garden. And we bet my tennis racket against five of Buzzy’s records. Don’t anyone call me, because it’s got to be fair.”

Doris and Tommy decided that they were sleepy too, and the three went upstairs together, leaving Jean and her mother to read in the big living room. Presently Mrs. Craig glanced up and saw that the book lay idle on Jean’s lap, and she was looking down at the wood fire that burned on the old fireplace.

“What is it, dear?” she asked. “Tired?”

Jean shook her head, and smiled. “No, country life doesn’t tire me. I love it even though I am lonesome for my old friends. I think I’ll go over to Sally’s tomorrow and see if she’ll take me to meet some of the young people.” Jean dangled her legs over the arm of the chair and studied her scuffed saddle shoes. “If they are all as nice as Buzzy and Sally they must be swell.”

12. The Craigs Plan a Barbecue

Breakfast at Woodhow was supposed to be seven-thirty, but the girls and Tommy got up at about six and spent the hour before out in the garden. It was so fascinating, Doris said, to be out-of-doors in the early morning. Sometimes when the air was warmer than the ground there would be a morning mist out of which rose clumps of tree tops like little islands.

The following day, at five-thirty exactly, Jean wakened drowsily to find Kit standing by her bed, already dressed in blue jeans and a sweater.

“I want you to look at this clock and be a witness that I’m up on time,” she said briskly, holding up an alarm clock. “It’s perfectly gorgeous outside, Jean. I don’t see how you can lie and sleep with all nature calling.”

“Nature didn’t call you before, did she, Kathleen? Go away and let me sleep.”

“Well, I get the records anyway.” She seated herself blithely on the foot of the bed. Jean sat up and hurled her pillow at her, but Kit dodged and ran, laughing, down the hall.

After breakfast though, when the dew was gone from the meadow grass, Jean had Buzzy saddle Princess, the mare, and declared she was going to ride over and get Sally to take her visiting. Kit and Tommy were busy out in the kitchen garden, and Doris was helping with the dusting. For some reason Jean wanted to go without them on this first reconnoitering expedition.

She rode down the hill toward Elmhurst, bowed with a little rising flush of color to the group in the front of the feed store, and stopped before the brown and white house where the Hancocks lived.

“Hello, Jean,” called Sally buoyantly, beating some oval-braided rugs out on the clothesline. “Can you stop in?”

Jean leaned forward, the reins held loosely in her hand. “I wanted to see if you couldn’t go riding with me. Just so I can meet some of the girls. We want to give a barbecue or some sort of a party to get acquainted with our neighbors.”

“Why, the idea,” Sally exclaimed, dropping her stick and pushing back her hair. “I think that’s awfully nice. Wait till I ask Mother if I can go.”

Jean waited and presently Mrs. Hancock stepped out on the side porch and down the steps. She was rather like Buzzy and Sally, curly-haired and young-looking, with deep dimples and eyes that still held an abiding happiness in their blue depths. Her face was careworn and there were lines around her mouth that told of repressed pain, but it was the look in the eyes that held you. Luella Trowbridge may have gone through trouble, but she had married the man she loved and had been happy with him. She stretched out both hands to Jean.

“Buzzy’s told us so much about all of you up there that it seems as if I know every single one of you,” she said pleasantly. “You’re Jean, aren’t you? Of course Sally can go along if she wants to. Don’t forget the new girl over at the old Parmelee place.”

Jean never forgot that morning. They rode miles together, stopping at the different houses and meeting the girls who were, to Jean at least, the material upon which she had to work.

At the old Ames place they found the two Swedish girls, tall, blonde, and blue-eyed, working out in the onion patch with their brothers. Ingeborg was the elder and Astrid the younger, sixteen and fourteen years old. They had moved from New York two years before, but had both gone to the public schools there and were ready for anything Jean suggested.

“Ingeborg belonged to a basketball team,” Astrid said. “I can swim and play tennis best.”

The Chapelles lived in a little gray house close to the road on Huckleberry Hill, two miles below Rebecca’s. Etoile was shy-eyed and graceful, smiling but non-committal, and little Tony peered around her mother’s skirts at the stranger on horseback and coquetted mischievously. But they would come, and gladly, Mrs. Chapelle promised.

“They like very much to come, you see?” she said eagerly, trying to detach Tony from her skirt. “Tony, I have shame for you, _ma petite_. Why don’t you come out and say hello? Etoile, go bring some lilacs, quick!”

Etoile sped away to the tall rows of white and purple lilac bushes, and broke off two large bunches to give to Jean and Sally. Then Mrs. Chapelle remembered that she must send over to her new neighbor a pat of her butter. Such beautiful butter never anyone see, never. Jean must ride around through the lane and see the three Jersey cows browsing there in the clover field, Henriette, Desiree, and Susette.

Last of all came the Icelandic farm, and here Jean found only the hired men, two grave-faced, light-haired transplanted vikings, who eyed her curiously and silently. Hedda, the daughter, and her mother had driven over to sell two young pigs at the Finnish place.

“Oh, golly,” laughed Jean, “let’s go home. I feel as if I had been riding like Peer Gynt, all over the world, just touching at countries here and there. Let’s go right straight home, so I can talk to Mother and get a perspective on it all.”

“Better ask the Mill girls over while you’re about it,” Sally suggested, so they made one last stop at the red sawmill in the valley below Woodhow. “They’re Americans. My friend lives here, Lucy Peckham. She’s got five sisters and three brothers, but Lucy’s the whole family herself.”

The three brothers worked in the sawmill after school, and Jean didn’t see them, but Lucy sufficed. She came running out of the kitchen with a brown and white checked apron covering her up, and her red hair streaming behind her. She was short and freckled and not one bit pretty, unless good health and happiness and smiles made up for beauty. But the instant you met Lucy you recognized executive ability concentrated in human form.

“Billy, keep out of those lettuce beds,” she called to a younger brother, strayed somehow from the mill. “How do you do, Miss Craig—”

“Oh, call me Jean,” Jean said quickly. “We’re close neighbors. If we didn’t hear your whistle we’d never know what time it is.”

“Well, we’ve been intending to get up the valley to see you, but Mother hasn’t been well, and all the girls are younger than I, so I help around the house. We’ve got twins in our family, did Sally tell you? Sally and I named them. We thought of everything under the sun, Martha Washington and Betsey Ross, and Ruth and Naomi, and Mercy and Faith, and then we got it all at once. We’ve had twins in our family before, Josephine and Imogene, that’s Mother and Aunt Jo, but we didn’t want to repeat. Somehow, it didn’t show any imagination.” She laughed and so did Jean. “So we called ours Elva and Sylvia. We say Elvy and Sylvy for short. Anne and Charlotte are twelve and nine and the twins are only five. They’re too cute for anything. Wish you’d all come down and see us Sunday afternoon.”

“Lucy’d ask the whole world to supper Sunday afternoon,” Sally said as they finally turned up the home road. “She’s just a dear, and she has to work all the time. She never has a single day to herself, and she doesn’t mind it a bit. She does manage to get away to sing in the choir Sunday mornings, but that’s all. And even if she isn’t pretty, she’s got a voice that makes gooseflesh come out all over you, and you shut your eyes and just tingle when it rises and falls. I think she’s wonderful. Isn’t her hair red?”

“It’s coppery and it’s beautiful,” Jean answered decidedly. “I think she’s swell. Why can’t Anne and Charlotte buckle down and help, so that Lucy can get away once in a while?”

“Her mother says she can’t do without her.”

Jean pondered over that and finally decided it was too deep for her to settle. It had been a very profitable afternoon, and after she had taken Sally home, she rode into the home drive, feeling as if she really had a line on Elmhurst girls. Tommy came running down to meet her as she jumped off, while Buzzy came to take care of Princess. Tommy’s eyes were shining with excitement.

“Jeannie, what do you suppose has happened?”

“Something’s sprouted,” Jean guessed laughingly. Tommy spent most of his time watching to see if any of the seeds had started to sprout.

“No. It isn’t that. Gypsy’s got little chickens. She marched into the barnyard with ten of them, as proud as anything. And nobody knows where she hatched them at all.”

Jean had to go immediately to see the new brood. Gypsy had cuddled them around her in the barn on a pile of hay and steadfastly refused to be removed. If ever a hen looked nonchalant she did, quite as if she would have said, “I can do it just as well as any of these ridiculous nesters that you’re so proud of, and my chicks are twice as perfect as theirs.”

“They’re wonderful babies, Gypsy,” Jean told her. “Be careful of them now. Mothers have to behave themselves, you know. No more gallivanting off to the woods.”

“She probably will. I’m going to put them into a little coop tomorrow and her too.”

It only proved, as Kit remarked, what children would do for a flighty and light-minded person.

Jean changed into a dress and ran down into the kitchen to help get lunch and tell her experiences of the day, which proved so entertaining and comical that Mrs. Craig finally came out and asked if they were ever to have anything to eat.

“Dad’s tray is all ready, Mom,” Jean replied, sitting up on the kitchen stool beside the stove, “I’m just waiting for the biscuits to bake, and Kit’s fixing a beautiful jelly omelette. Mother, you never saw anything so funny as these precious inhabitants, but they’re all gold, just the same, and I like them. And we’re going to have a barbecue.”

13. Swing Your Partner

“We’ve forgotten to write Mr. McRae and tell him how much we like the house,” Doris said a few days later.

“He doesn’t know anything about the house, or care either,” protested Kit, struggling with some raspberry bushes that needed disentangling and tying back against the woodshed boards. “He’s never even seen it. Do you suppose he has the least bit of sentiment for it the way we have or Sally has? I wouldn’t bother to write to him.”

“Oh, I would,” Doris answered serenely. She was down on her knees hunting for four-leaf clovers. “It isn’t his fault that he’s never seen the place. Maybe we could coax him back.”

“We don’t want to coax him back. It must be our one endeavor to keep him right out there in Saskatoon forever. We must tell him the cellar’s damp and the roof leaks and the whole place has gone to rack and ruin. If we don’t he may come East and take it away from us, and we want to save up and buy it and give it back to Sally and her Mother and Buzzy.”

“What’s Buzzy’s real name?” asked Tommy irrelevantly. “I never thought to ask him.”

“He wants to study electrical engineering or else be a rancher,” Kit said. “I never asked him what his real name is. You’re awfully inquisitive, Tommy.”

“What do all boys see in ranches, I wonder,” put in Doris. “Back at the Cove, Dave Phelps always wanted to be a cowboy and he’s got to be a lawyer, his father says.”

“Maybe he’ll escape West some day and be whatever he likes. I think one of the very worst things in life is to have to be something you don’t want to be.” Kit surveyed her work. “Of course, in the ups and downs and uncertainties, as Becky would remark, we must be prepared for all things, but if you can decide what you’re best fitted for, then you ought to aim everything at that mark. If Buzzy wants to be an electrical engineer, he ought to get books now, and study them hard, and if he wants to be a rancher, he ought to go West—”

A voice came from midair apparently, overhead on the woodshed roof which Buzzy was patching with waterproof paint and tar. It was a mild and cheerful voice and showed plainly that Buzzy was personally interested in the conversation.

“I can’t go West just now, Mom needs me. But I’m going as soon as I can.”

The three stared up at him with laughing faces. “Buzzy Hancock,” exclaimed Tommy, “why didn’t you sing out to us before?”

“Wanted to hear what you had to say,” said Buzzy simply. “Thought maybe I’d get some good advice. And my first name’s Seth. Seth Guilford Trowbridge Hancock. I’m named for my grandfather. Sally called me Buzzy when I was a little kid, so I suppose that I’ll be that all my life.”

“Sally and Buzzy,” repeated Doris musingly, “when you’re really Sarah and Seth. Nicknames are queer, aren’t they? I think that babies should be called pet names till they’re old enough to choose their own. Still Seth’s a good name. It’s a name to grow up to, Buzzy. You ought to be stout and dignified, like Mr. Pickwick.”

“Guess I don’t know him, do I?” asked Buzzy. “Sally wants to be something too, but girls can’t do that. She wants to be a builder and look after land. She wants to go to the State Agricultural College too, and take the forestry course. Do you know what she does? She read some place that the chestnut trees were dying out, so she takes a pocketful of sound chestnuts with her whenever she goes out for a walk in the woods, and every once in a while she sticks her finger in the ground and plants a chestnut. What do you think of that?”

Kit drew in a deep breath.

“I think she’s wonderful. I don’t see why she can’t go to the State College if she likes, or why she can’t take the forestry course. It isn’t whether you’re a boy or a girl that matters in such things. It’s just whether you can do the work that counts.”

“She can shut her eyes and walk through the woods and tell the name of every tree just by feeling its leaves.”

Jean appeared on the back porch and called down to them to come up and wash for dinner. She stood there in the doorway for a minute after the rest had gone in, looking out at the fields highlighted by the sun. As she stood there Buzzy came up, looking as if there was something on his mind.

After a moment he said, “Jean, there’s going to be a barn dance up at the Grange Saturday night. I wondered if you’d like to go?”

“What? A barn dance? I’ve never been to one. I’d love to. What are they like?” said Jean all in one breath.

“Oh, they’re a lot of fun. Everybody goes to them. They do square dancing and sometimes they do regular dancing besides. They have a caller, a man who plays the fiddle and directs the dancing so you know what steps to use. It’s not hard to learn.”

“It sounds like a good time,” said Jean.

“OK, then, I’ll pick you up about eight. That be all right?”

“Swell, Buzzy. Gee, I’d better go! Something’s burning.” With that Jean turned and ran back into the kitchen, feeling happier than she had since the family had moved to Woodhow. When she told her mother about it later, Mrs. Craig agreed that Buzzy was very nice indeed to have offered to show her some of the fun of living in the country.

Saturday night promptly at eight o’clock, Buzzy appeared at the front door with his hair slicked down, his shoes polished, and looking quite different from the boy who worked in the fields all day in overalls. Jean opened the door for him, wearing a pretty light blue cotton dress that set off her dark hair.

“Hi, Buzzy. Come on in. I’m all ready.” She picked up her bag, called good night to her family and they went out.

It was a lovely spring evening, the smell of cherry blossoms hung in the air and the moon was beginning to come up over the hills. Buzzy opened the door of his battered jalopy and Jean got in. Walking around to the other side of the car, Buzzy broke off a sprig of cherry blossoms and tossed them into Jean’s lap. She turned and smiled at him as she fastened the flowers in her hair.

“Gee, you look nice tonight, Jeannie,” he said, and abruptly started the car.

Judging by the number of cars parked when they arrived at the Grange, there were already a number of people there before them. Inside they found quite a crowd. A square dance had already begun, so Jean and Buzzy stood watching the twirling mass of people dance by them.

“Gosh, they dance so fast. I’ll never be able to do it,” exclaimed Jean. “Does just that one fiddler play all evening?”

“Not always,” he explained. “Sometimes somebody plays the piano, too, or Jed Perkins brings his bass fiddle, but usually just Nate plays. That’s his name, Nate White. Come on, let’s try it. They’re starting again. Just follow me and you’ll be all right.”

Buzzy led her out onto the floor and they began to dance. Much to her surprise, Jean found the steps quite easy after she tried them a few times. It was far more strenuous than it looked, however, and after a couple of dances she was forced to sit down and catch her breath.

“I’ve never danced so fast in all my life,” she gasped while they were resting. “I’m terribly thirsty. Do you suppose they have anything cold to drink?”

“Sure,” said Buzzy. “I’ll be back in a minute with some of the best-tasting lemonade you ever drank.”

While he was gone, Sally appeared from out of the crowd and came over to where Jean was sitting. “Hi,” she said. “How do you like night life, country style?”

“It’s fun,” replied Jean, “although it’s a little exhausting. But then, country living seems to be more strenuous altogether than what I was used to.” Just then Buzzy came back with the lemonade and Sally moved off with her partner.

After a few more dances, Jean declared she couldn’t take it any more, so the two left and drove back home. At the door Jean said, “I can’t thank you enough for the lovely time tonight, Buzzy. I never knew a barn dance could be such fun.”

“We’ll have to try it again some night. Good night, Jean.”

“Good night.” And Jean went into the house and upstairs to Kit, who was still awake and waiting impatiently to hear the details of the dance. The two older girls had always discussed their dates and parties with each other back at the Cove, and the tradition was not broken now. Together in Jean’s room, they talked it over while Jean undressed.

“Buzzy’s tops, Jean,” said Kit, after she had finished describing the evening. “I’ll bet he’ll be the best friend we make in this neighborhood.”

“It’s an evening I won’t forget soon,” replied Jean sleepily. “My feet ache so from dancing, I couldn’t possibly forget it for at least a week.”

14. Kit to the Rescue

In the following days, the girls and Tommy turned their attention to plans for the barbecue. The first thing to be sure of was a full moon. This came along the last week in June, so they made their arrangements accordingly.

Buzzy and Sally took almost as much interest in the affair as the girls themselves. All that day, when it finally did arrive, they worked gathering wood for the fire, knocking together temporary picnic tables, and digging the barbecue pit at the back of the house. Doris was making the lemonade and said she had cut and squeezed lemons until her whole mouth was puckered up, and her fingernails felt pickled. Kit was everywhere at once, it seemed. She showed Buzzy how to make the spit for the meat to be cooked on. She beguiled Matt, who had come down from Maple Grove to help around a bit, into moving the phonograph out on the front porch.

It did seem as if all Elmhurst and surrounding territory had turned out to show its neighborly spirit. There were cars parked along the road, in the barnyard, the driveway, and everywhere.

“I shouldn’t wonder, Margie, if we had as many as a hundred folks here tonight,” remarked Becky.

“More likely two hundred, Rebecca. It looks like a big crowd all right.” They were up on the porch where Mrs. Craig hovered between the lounge chair where Mr. Craig sat, and her various guests, welcoming each in her own charming way.

Doris and Kit followed Jean’s lead. First Jean rounded up the girls whom she had met on the ride with Sally and introduced them to the other Craig sisters. Tommy could not be located from one minute to another. He raced all over the grounds. One minute he was back by the barbecue pit trying to supervise things but generally heckling Buzzy. The next minute he was back in the front of the house dodging in and out of the crowd. But Doris and Kit led the other girls over to where the lemonade, ice cream and cake was laid out and asked them to serve. It was much better than standing around, shy and silent, not knowing what to do next. Kit found one girl, Abby Tucker, leaning disconsolately against a pear tree at the side of the drive. Her white dress was too short for her, and her hair was straggling in limp strands down her back. She looked lonely and rather indignant too.

“Don’t you want to come over and help us with the ice cream?” asked Kit.

“No, I don’t,” said Abby flatly. “They always ask me to help pass things to eat at the church suppers. I want to have a good time myself tonight. Though we aren’t going to have a good time.”

Kit looked at her doubtfully. She thoroughly realized the state of mind that will not let itself be happy, that in fact, finds its happiness in being unhappy, but Abby’s moroseness baffled her.

“Don’t you like it here?” she asked.

Abby nodded.

“Don’t you know anyone?”

“Know most of them.”

“Then what is it?” Kit laid her arm timidly around the stooped shoulders and at the touch of real human sympathy, Abby’s reserve melted.

“My new shoes pinch awful,” she exploded.

Kit took her straight up to the house to her own room, and ransacked closets and shoe boxes until she found a pair of loafers to fit Abby, and the latter came down again smiling and radiant, ready to serve ice cream, or make herself agreeable in any way she could.

Sally came up to the porch, personally conducting her mother to Mrs. Craig. She was a tall, fair-haired woman with deep dimples like the children’s and a happy face. Seated in a chair on the porch with the roses and honeysuckle shedding a perfume around, she breathed a sigh of relief.

“Seems so nice to sit up here again, Mrs. Craig,” she said. “Sally’s told me all about how you’ve fixed the place up till it seemed as if I couldn’t wait to see it. I used to drive over once in a while after Father died, and get some slips of flowering quince and rose bushes to set out. You know I love every blade of grass in the garden and every pine cone on those trees.”