HELEN’S TEXT.
“Oh, dear me!” sighed
Eunice, dolefully, the next morning at breakfast.
“What dreadful changes there are going to be!
Hilda goes to-day, the boys leave on Monday for their
camp, and Edna goes on Tuesday to her grandmother’s.
Cricket and I will be left all forlorn.”
“Yes,” added Cricket,
pulling a long face, “and on Tuesday morning
Eunice and I will be wearing the garbage of woe.”
“Whatever you rig yourself up
in, Miss Scricket,” said Archie, amid the general
laughter, “don’t deck yourself out in garbage.
You’d be a public nuisance. Flowing ‘robes
of porcelain,’ like the heroine of one of your
stories, would be better.”
“You needn’t tease me
about that, for you know as well as anything that
I meant percaline.”
But Auntie Jean and grandma had to
enjoy this alone, for the boys were not equal to the
fine distinctions of girl’s apparel.
As Eunice said, there was a decided
scattering of their little party. Hilda left
Saturday afternoon, the boys departed on Monday, for
their camp in the Maine woods, with a party of friends,
and on Tuesday Edna had to go for her usual fortnight’s
visit to her grandmother Somers, who always spent
July and August at Lake Clear. She was a very
old lady, much older than Grandma Maxwell, and a good
deal of an invalid. Edna much preferred staying
with her cousins, but Grandmother Somers was very
devoted to her only little granddaughter, and this
was the particular time when she wanted her.
Edna had never been there without her mother before,
and really dreaded it. She had urged taking her
cousins with her, but Auntie Jean knew this would
be altogether too much responsibility for so old a
lady to have, since she herself could not leave Marbury.
“I hate to go like poison,”
sighed Edna to Eunice, as they strolled up and down
the station platform, while waiting for the train.
“I wish I could stay here. I wish grandma
wasn’t so fond of me. I wish you could
come, too. I wish the two weeks were over.
I wish ”
“Toot-to-toot!” whistled the approaching
train.
“Horrid old thing! I wish
it would run off the track! Wish Mrs. Abbott
would forget to start this morning. She isn’t
here yet. Do you suppose she’s forgotten?”
with sudden hopefulness.
Mrs. Abbott was a lady under whose care she was going.
“No such good luck!” murmured
Eunice. “There she is now. Write to
me every day, Edna.”
“And you’ll have time
to write some lovely stories for the ‘Echo,’”
chirped Cricket, encouragingly.
“Yes, I will, and be glad too.
It will be something to do. Think of my saying
I’d be glad to write stories! Yes, mamma good-by,
everybody,” and with hugs and kisses all around,
Edna was put on the train and was off.
The children were both very quiet
on their return ride from the station, and Auntie
Jean began to fear that they might be homesick, with
all their playmates gone. But when they reached
home again Cricket drew Eunice into a quiet corner,
and surprised her by flinging her arms around her
neck, with a gigantic hug.
“I do love Hilda and Edna,”
she said, “but there’s nobody like my old
Eunice, and I’m so glad to have you all
to myself for a little while again. I don’t
want to be selfish, and poor Edna hasn’t any
sister, but ”
“Why, you poor little thing!”
said Eunice, hugging her small sister, heartily.
“I expect I’ve been very selfish.
I’ve never thought that, perhaps, you were being
lonely when I was so much with Edna. You always
seemed so happy.”
“Oh, I am happy!”
answered Cricket, surprised. “I always am,
I guess. But I do love to be with you, all by
your lonesome, and now let’s have some real
old Kayuna times. Come down on the beach, and
let’s talk about it,” with another squeeze.
And then, with their arms about each other’s
waists, they ran down the yard.
On the small sloping beach behind
the big rocks, Zaidee and Helen and Kenneth were playing
by themselves. Helen and Kenneth were sitting
up very straight and stiff, with their little legs
out straight in front of them, and their small hands
folded in their laps. They were listening with
intent faces, and round, wide-open eyes, to Zaidee,
who, with small forefinger uplifted, was telling them
something, with a very serious face. The girls
crept softly near to see what they were doing.
“And these naughty chil’en,”
went on Zaidee, “came out of the city, and they
made lots of fun of Lishers, and they ran after him,
an’ kept calling him names, an’ saying,
’Go up, olé bullhead! go up, olé bullhead!’
An’ Lishers got very angry as angry
as Luke did the other day, when I asked him if he
liked to have such mixed-up eyes,” (poor Luke
was very cross-eyed, and very sensitive about it),
“and he said, ’There’s some gré-at
big bears in these woods, ‘n’ I’ll
call ’em to come and eat you chil’en up,
if you doesn’t stop calling names. Only
bad little chil’en, ’thout any one to
tell ’em any better, calls names.’
But they didn’t one of ’em stop, an’
Lishers just whistled, an’ forty-two bears came
trotting right out of the woods, an’ eated up every one of those bad chil’en,
quicker’n scat. ’Liza said so, herself.
So, Helen and Kenneth, you mustn’t ever call
any one any names, an’ specially you mustn’t
call ’em ‘bullheads,’ cause bears
will come out of the woods an’ eat you all up,
and it’s very unpolite, too.”
Helen looked awed, and Kenneth unbelieving.
“Ain’t any bears,” he said, stoutly.
“You mustn’t inkerrupt
the Sunday school,” said Zaidee, severely.
“Any way, there are crocky-dolls, if there ain’t
any bears. I saw a funny, long thing come out
of the water the other day, and ’Liza said she
guessed it was a crocky-doll.”
“Tould it eat me up?” demanded Kenneth,
hastily.
“I don’t think it could
eat you all up at once,” said Zaidee, cautiously;
“but it might take bites out of you.”
“What are you doing, children?”
said Eunice, coming forward, and throwing herself
on the sand beside them, and pulling Helen, her special
pet, down into her arms.
“Playing Sunday school, Eunice,”
said Zaidee, sitting down, herself. “We’re
going to have a Sunday school every Tuesday afternoon,
just the same as you have the Echo Club, you know.
Helen’s going to make up the texts. She
makes up beautiful texts, just like the Bible.”
“Why, Zaidee!” remonstrated
Eunice, looking shocked. “You mustn’t
say that anything is as nice as the Bible. What
was it, pettikins?”
But Helen was shy, and needed much
coaxing before she could be persuaded to give her
“text,” which was a very practical one.
“She who doth not what she is told, gets worse.”
“Bravo!” cried Eunice, laughing.
“That is a fine text.”
“She made it up all her own
self,” said Zaidee, quite as proud of her twin’s
performance as if it had been her own.
“I don’t want to play
Sunday school any more, Zaidee,” said Kenneth,
getting up. “I’d ravver play turch.
I’m ze talking man, wiv white skirts on,”
he added, standing on a stone, and waving his short
arms about, for the young man had made his first appearance
at church the Sunday before, and had wanted to play
“turch” ever since.
“You were a naughty boy,”
said Zaidee, reproachfully, “you talked out
loud right in meetin’-church, and I was so ’shamed.”
“And you falled off the stool
when all the people were kneeling down and saying,
‘The seats they do hear us, O Lord;’ and
you made a great big noise,” added Helen,
severely, for her.
“‘The seats they do hear
us,’” repeated Cricket. “What
does she mean, Eunice, do you suppose?”
“Why, don’t you know,
Cricket,” explained Helen, for herself.
“When all the people are kneeling down, and
the minister keeps saying things, and the people keep
saying, ‘The seats they do hear us,’ ’course
they hear them, ’cause they say it right at
the back of the seats.”
Eunice and Cricket shouted with laughter.
“She means, ‘We beseech
Thee to hear us,’” cried Cricket, choking,
quite as if she never made any mistakes on her own
account. But other people’s mistakes are
so different from our own. Helen, her sensitive
feelings dreadfully hurt, instantly retired under
her apron, and refused to be comforted. They
always had to be careful about laughing at Helen,
whereas Zaidee never seemed to mind.
“Never mind, pet,” said
Eunice, kissing and petting her. “It wasn’t
a very bad mistake.”
“What’s this?” said
Cricket, to change the subject She had been plunging
her arm down deep in the sand, and had struck something
big and bony. She cleared away the loose sand.
“That’s our cemi-terror,”
explained Zaidee; “we’d been having a frinyal
before we had Sunday school, and we buried that thing.
We finded it in the field the other day. Let’s
pull it up now, Helen. We’ve had lots of
frinyals, Cricket, and we’ve buried ever so many
things in our cemi-terror. Turkles
and things like that, you know.”
Cricket, with some difficulty, extricated
the object. It was a great skull of a cow, bleached
as white as snow.
“’Liza says it was a cow,
once,” observed Zaidee, poking her fingers in
the big holes where the eyes once were. “It
was a pretty funny cow, I think. She says
it has undressed all its flesh off, and we’re
all like that inside. But I’m not, see?”
and Zaidee opened her mouth wide and offered it for
inspection. “Mine’s all red inside.”
“Mamma says we’re made
of dust,” said Helen, thoughtfully. “If
we’re made out of dust, I don’t see why
we don’t get all muddy inside when we drink.”
“I guess that’s why my
hands get so dirty,” said Zaidee, suddenly,
looking at her small, grimy palms with close attention.
“I guess it sifts right through my skin.
Course I can’t keep clean when it keeps sifting
through all the time, and ’Liza says she don’t
see how I get myself so dirty,”
with a funny imitation of Eliza’s tones.
“I’m going to tell her I can’t help
it. If she keeps scrubbing me as fast as it comes
out, it may get all used up inside of me sometime,”
went on Zaidee, who was nothing if not logical.
Helen thoughtfully squeezed Eunice’s
arm, trying to squeeze some dust out, she said.
“Yours is all used up, I guess,”
she concluded, as she met with no success.
Cricket set the skull upon the high
stone which Kenneth had been using for a pulpit.
“Look, Eunice! It looks
just like an idol, sitting up there and grinning.
Oh, let’s play we’re idollers ourselves
and worship it! We’ll build a shrine for
it, and we’ll offer it sacrifices. Come
on!” and Cricket, with her usual energy, fell
to work instantly, building stones up for an altar.