Happy Days for Boys and Girls

“I promised mamma I would try and finish it this week,” said Emily, “and I like to keep my word.”

“I thought the machine sewed.”

“So it does; but mamma says I must learn just the same as if there were no machines.”

“Well, I’m glad I’m not a girl, to sit pricking my fingers, and jabbing needles in and out all day.”

Patience was not one of Will’s virtues.

How lovely it was out under the elm! The sweet-scented grass was warm with the afternoon sun, and musical with the chirp and hum of its insect homes. The bees fluttered in and out over mamma’s rose garden, and all the air was filled with the delicate fragrance of the roses.

Emily, seated on the great gnarled elm roots, drank in all the sweet scents and sounds, her forgotten work-basket lying overturned in the grass before her. Will spread himself out at full length on the ground, and kept his eyes open for chippers and spiders, and all the busy little things that crept, or leaped, or flitted around him. Now and then the afternoon hush was broken by the faintly tinkling bells of a horse-car turning some distant corner, the rumbling of a heavy team going over the dusty turnpike, or the voices of the belfry clocks calling the hour to each other from the steeples of the neighboring city.

Master Will, however, soon became tired of this quiet. He scrambled up, and wandering away into the rose garden, lifted caressingly to his cheek the beautiful pink blossoms which leaned towards him from amid the green leaves. He was looking for a choice little bud to fasten in Emily’s hair; and when he found it, he came whistling out into the clear grassy spaces again, a little bird in a bough overhead tilting, and twittering, and eying him askance.

Will rushed up to Emily, and hung the bud in her ear; he rearranged it in the blue ribbon of her hair, so that it nodded sleepily over her nose; he dropped it, as if it were a tiny pink egg, in the soft golden moss of curls which he upturned on his sister’s head. Then he threw it away, and stamped on it; for Emily had drawn a book from her pocket, and deep in some fairy under-world story, was unmindful of his roses and his pains.

He ran recklessly away into the rose garden; he caught a bumblebee; he pursued a daddy long-leg with the watering-pot, going deeper and deeper all the time among the briery branches. The crashing of the stems caused Emily to come up from fairy-land a moment.

“Have a care, Will, dear. The roses have thorns. You may tear your nice jacket.”

Crash, crash! rip, rip! The rose trees are dragging at Will with their prickly fingers. With great effort he burst away from them, and rushed out, with no worse mischance than a rent in his trousers.

“Aw! aw! aw!”

All the little knolls seemed to take up Will’s sorrowful cry, and repeat it.

“You must not tear or soil your clothes.”

Every cricket in the grass seemed to be screaming these words of his mother, and here was her luckless son with two green spots on his stockings, and a grievous rent in his new pantaloons.

It was Kathleen’s afternoon out; she had warned him, and there was no help in that direction. He looked mournfully over his shoulder at the damages with a vague idea that he had perhaps some undeveloped capacity for mending.

“Couldn’t you pin it up nicely?” he inquired, in most insinuating tones, of Emily, whose eye just then met his.

Emily burst into a merry laugh.

Will was mute with indignation, and tingling to his finger’s ends, with this untimely mirth. His flashing eyes asked if this were a time for jesting.

“Come here, Willy, boy, and you’ll see how nicely I’ll sew it, not pin it. Never fret about it, dear; I will explain to mamma that you were really not so much in fault. It was only rather a mistake to get in so far among the bushes. If you had been chasing the cat, or turning somersets, she might, perhaps, be vexed; but poh! she will excuse this.”

Will, unseen by Emily, wiped away with his thumb one big tear after another out of the corner of his eye.

“She is a good sister, anyhow, and I am a mean fellow ever to get mad with her, and say rude things to her,” he said to himself, as Emily darned, and chatted, and bade him be of good cheer.

“My stockings, too, sister. There’s a great green grass stain on both of them, and grandmamma expects us to be so nice.”

Will coughed to choke down a sob.

“Perhaps you may have time to change them, Will. I will help you. But we must get the pantaloons all nicely done first.”

So this kind sister stitched, and taught unconsciously as she stitched, lessons of love and patience, lessons of cheerful helpfulness and sweet unselfishness, which Will never forgot.

More than once, in after life, when, in heedless pursuit of life’s roses, he had been wounded by its thorns, he remembered that sweet face of consolation, those dear hands held out to aid him, and all the sunshine and the song of that sweet summer afternoon, and fresh peace and hope came to him with the remembrance.

“It’s all finished now, the very last stitch; and now for the stockings. Let me see the spots.”

Will put his two heels firmly together, turned out his toes, pulled up his puffy pantaloons, and stooped his head and strained his eyes to look for them.

They were but little ones, after all, and a brisk rubbing with the handkerchief, and a judicious pulling down of the trouser bindings, almost concealed them. They were just in time with their repairs; for grandmamma’s yellow-wheeled carriage was coming up the avenue.

    E. G. C.

OUR DAILY BREAD

A LITTLE girl knelt down to pray
One morn. The mother said,
“My love, why do we ever say,
Give us our daily bread?
Why not ask for a week or more?”
The baby bent her head
In thoughtful mood towards the floor:
“We want it fresh,” she said.

WILLIE’S PRAYER

ONE sweet morning little Willie,
Springing from his trundle-bed,
Bounded to the vine-wreathed window
And put out his sunny head.

It was in the joyous spring-time,
When the sky was soft and fair,
And the blue-bird and the robin
Warbled sweetly everywhere.

In the field the lambs were playing,
Where the babbling brook ran clear;
To and fro, in leafy tree-tops,
Squirrels frisked without a fear.

In his ear his baby-brother
Baby-wonders tried to speak,
And the kiss of a fond mother
Rested on his dimpled cheek.

Zephyrs from the fragrant lilacs
Fanned his little rosy face,