Greenacre Girls

CHAPTER IX

THE LADY MANAGERS CHOOSE A NAME

That very night a council was held of what Mr. Robbins termed "the Board of Lady Managers."

"I think I need Hiram in here for support," he said laughingly, from his favorite resting place, the old fashioned high-backed davenport in the sitting-room.

There were no such things at Maple Lawn as a library, a reception room, or a den. There was a front entry and a side entry and a well-room at the back of the kitchen. There was a parlor and a front bed-room, a side bed-room and a big sunny sitting-room that was dining-room also, and finally the old kitchen with its Dutch oven, and hooks in the ceiling for hanging up smoked beef and bacon sides.

Not that Cousin Roxy ever used the Dutch oven nowadays excepting to store things away in. She had instead a fine shiny, water-back steel range, over which she hovered like a sorceress from five A.M. to eleven A.M., producing such marvels of cookery as held the girls spellbound: raised doughnuts with jam inside and powdered sugar outside; apple turnovers made with Peck's Pleasants and rich Baldwins; ginger cookies, large as saucers with scalloped edges, soft and rich as butter scotch; and pies, with rich, flaky crust and delectable filling in endless varieties. Jean declared that she had learned more about cooking in the few weeks she had lived at Maple Lawn than in all her life before.

"Well, there's cooking and cooking, girls," Cousin Roxana had replied placidly, fishing for brown doughnuts with her long, hand-wrought iron fork. "It's one thing to cook when you've got everything to do with, and quite another when you are eternally figuring out how to make both ends meet. Of course, I don't have to do that. Land knows there's plenty to eat and more to, praise the Lord, but it's all plain food, and you've got to learn how to toss vegetables around in forty different ways out here if you want any variety."

That evening it was when the Board of Lady Managers discussed everything that lay ahead of them from the said vegetables to chickens, cows, horses, and farm implements.

Mr. Robbins had seemed relieved when he was sure that the Motherbird approved of the Mansion House. It was near Maple Lawn and Roxana, he said, and they would surely need both many times during their first experimental year in the country. Also, it was on the mail route, and not too large a place in acreage for them to handle. There was a good apple orchard, somewhat run down, but it would be all right with pruning and proper care. Besides, there were four good pear trees, two large cherry trees, white hearts and red, and three crabapple trees.

"Guess if you hunt around, you might find some quinces too, and plenty of berries and currants," Cousin Roxana said. "It's been let go to waste the past few years, and it'll take a year or more to get it back into shape. You'd better write out West and get a three-year lease, with option of purchase."

"We couldn't think of buying it, even with water rights and all," Mrs. Robbins demurred, "but we might try the three-year lease. What do you think, dear?"

"I should write tonight," Mr. Robbins told her, confidently. "Even if I should gain my health completely" – how cheerily he said it, the girls thought-"we could still stay up here summers, and you all would enjoy it, I know. Look at Dorrie's pink cheeks, and Jean looks like another girl. If I keep on much longer on Roxy's cooking, I expect to be mowing hay in the lower meadows by July."

So the letter was written, the wonderful letter freighted with so many hopes. All four girls escorted Mrs. Robbins down to the mailbox at the crossroads the next noon. It was truly a fateful moment, as Kit remarked solemnly. So much depended upon the nature of the answer from far-off Saskatoon. Perched on the fence rail Dorrie began to compose poetry to fit the occasion.

"Kit, beat time for me, will you?" she called happily, teetering on the rail like a young bluebird. "Here it goes now:

What's his name, Mumsie?"

"Ralph McRae," Jean answered for her mother.

"You know, really, Dorrie," protested Helen, "if you could just see yourself on that rail fence chanting doggerel to the spring breezes, you'd come down."

But Doris kept to the rail all the same, and sang with her fair hair blowing around her little face, already showing freckles. Even Kit felt the inspiration of the moment.

"Oh, I love these April mornings! You can smell everything that's sweet and new in the air, can't you, Motherkin? And I found arbutus buds down in the pines too, and an old crow's nest, and the crocuses are up."

Mrs. Robbins lifted her face to the blue sky, with its great white clouds that drifted up from the south in an endless argosy of beauty, and quoted softly:

"There comes the mail wagon down the wildwood way," Jean called from the curve of the road.

Already they had grown to watch for it as the one real event of the day. Mrs. Robbins said it reminded her of the little milk wagons in the South. It had a white oblong body with a projection at the back, a "lean-to" as Cousin Roxana called it, for parcel post packages. The top came forward over the front seat in a canopy effect to shield Mr. Ricketts, the rural free delivery carrier, from the sun. Finally, there was a plump white horse that matched the whole turnout exactly, and Mr. Ricketts, his cap pushed back on his head, a smile of perpetual well-being on his face.

"Looks like we'd get a spell of fine weather," he called. "Tell Miss Robbins I noticed a postcard for her about her subscription being up for her floral monthly, and if she ain't going to renew hers, I'll send in my own for this year."

"Now just hear that," exclaimed Cousin Roxy when she was given the message. "He's read my floral monthly regularly coming along the route. Well, I don't know as I mind. He's a real good mail carrier anyhow, and all men have failings. Hewers of wood and drawers of water, the good Book calls them, and I'd like to know what else the pesky things are for. That doesn't mean you at all, Jerry. You were always a good boy. Tom Ricketts knows better than to read my floral monthly without so much as by your leave, ma'am. But I'll renew it."

"He must have read the postcard too," said Helen.

"Read it?" Cousin Roxy sniffed audibly. "I'd like to see anything get by them down at that post office. They know a sight more about you than you do yourself. Postmaster Willets could sit down single-handed and write a history of the local inhabitants of this town just from memory and postcards, I don't doubt a mite."

The very next day the girls went again to the Mansion House. The keys were at Mr. Weaver's, the next house down the road from Maple Lawn. It was a regular gray mouse of a house sitting far back from the road and facing the western hills. Philemon Weaver lived there alone. He was ninety-one and had had six wives, Cousin Roxana told them.

"Though mercy knows, nobody holds that against him. It was a compliment to the sex, I suppose, if he could get them. And Uncle Philly's buried them all reverently and properly."

They found the old fellow working at a carpenter's bench out in the woodshed. His hair was gray and curly and his upper lip clean shaven. Doris said he looked just like the pictures of Uncle Sam. He was tall and lean and stoop-shouldered, but his blue eyes were full of twinkles and he had the finest set of false teeth, Kit remarked soberly, that she'd ever seen, and the most winsome smile.

"Winsome? Philly Weaver winsome?" laughed Cousin Roxana when she heard it. "Well, I must say, Kit, that is the greatest yet. Winsome!"

"But he is," Kit protested, "really winsome. He gave us each a drink from his well and showed Jean his Dutch tile stove and his grandfather's clock. And he's got the dearest old chest out in that side hall, Cousin Roxy. I asked him how much he'd take for it, and he said no, he guessed he'd better not, though it was worth as much as two dollars and a half, but it had been his great-grandmother's setting-out chest. Wasn't that dear of him?"

Armed with the key and waving good-bye to the old man at the top of the hill, they started down to the crossroads. Already they called the house home. It was so satisfying, Kit said, just to wander about the rooms and plan. There was one large southeast room that must be the living-room and library combined. Back of this, opening out on a wide side porch, was the dining-room. On the opposite side of the front hallway was a sitting-room with a glass-enclosed extension for flowers, and between it and the kitchen was a good-sized hallway lined with shelves and long handy drawers beneath them.

It was the kitchen and garret, though, that the girls lingered over most. The former extended across the entire back of the house and Helen counted eleven doors opening out of it. The floor was made of oaken planks worn smooth as satin, some of them over two feet wide. Behind the sheet iron partition, they found a huge old-fashioned rock fireplace with the crane still hanging in it. Helen and Doris could easily stand inside the aperture and there was a jutting out of the walls on each side that formed the cosiest kind of an inglenook.

quoted Kit, from "The Hanging of the Crane." "Where are you, Jeanie? You're missing thrills of discovery."

But Jean was getting her own thrills. She had gathered her skirts around her, and ventured down the old winding cellar steps, groped around in the dark until she found the outside doors and removed the big wooden bar that held them. The stone steps outside were green with moss, and an indignant toad hopped back out of the sunlight when she threw open the doors.

"We'll get the mouldy smell out of the cellar in a few days," she told the others, rolling up her sleeves and sitting down in the sunshine on the top step. "And there's a furnace down there, too. It looks old and rusty, but it's there. No wonder they called it the Mansion House with a real furnace in the cellar and running water in the kitchen sink. But how funny and New Englandy, girls, to call it that, doubling up on mansion and house. Let's name it something else, something piney."

"Valley View," suggested Helen.

"Sounds too slippery," Kit said. "How's Heart's Content? Too sentimental? Well then, Piney Crest. It is on a sort of crest or mount up here above the valley and the pines make it seem solemn."

"Well, they won't after we once get here," Doris declared. "Let's call it something happy."

Kit stood with arms akimbo, looking up at the tall tapering pines. They were splendid old lords of the conifers, towering as high as the cupola itself. Their branches spread out like great hoopskirts of green. Underneath was a thick silky carpet of russet needles, layer on layer from many seasons of growth. Beyond the limits of the garden lay the strip of white road, and across that came wide fields that seemed to fall in long waves to meet the river. On all sides they slipped away from the old mansion, their square borders outlined with the gray rock walls, each with its brave showing of springtime green, where every clambering vine had sent forth leafy tendrils, and even the moss had freshened up under the April showers.

"In a couple of weeks more they'll all be green," said Jean, her dark eyes bright with anticipation. "And we'll plough them and sow them, and they'll grow and grow, girls, and turn a real golden harvest over to us by fall. Blessed green acres of promise!"

"There you are," exclaimed Kit triumphantly, wheeling around on them. "Greenacres. It just fits the place, and it's full of the country and makes you think of good things to eat. Greenacres. All in favor of that name please signify in the usual manner."

Whereupon Doris picked up her skirts and made a low curtesy, and Helen did the same, and lastly Jean and Kit swept each other an elaborate court bow, showing that the vote was entirely unanimous.

Therefore, Greenacres was the new name given to the old Mansion House, and the girls felt that in the bestowal of the name, they held a guarantee with Fate of happy augury.

CHAPTER X

SETTLING THE NEST

"Goods have come," called Mr. Ricketts from the mail box one morning. The pink freight card lay on top, and he seemed as pleased as anyone to find it there. "Letter from out West too, I noticed, so I presume you folks will be settled pretty soon."

"I almost feel as if I ought to let him read what Mr. McRae says," Mrs. Robbins said amusedly. "He's so friendly and interested."

As she opened the letter, the girls gathered around her chair, eager-eyed and curious to see what it contained. Jean declared that she liked the handwriting because it was firm and plain without any flourishes. Kit was sure he used a stub pen and was rather morose and dignified. Helen asked if she might keep the postage stamp for a memento, and Doris kept patting her mother's shoulder tenderly as if she would have protected her against any disappointment.

"You read it, dear. I'd much rather you did," the Motherbird said, handing it over to Mr. Robbins.

Cousin Roxana was out in the buttery singing softly to herself about some day when the mists had rolled in splendor from the beauty of the hills, and the nurse was upstairs, packing to return to New York the following day. There was just their own little home group of robins and they listened anxiously for the verdict. The letter ran:

SASKATOON, SASKATCHEWAN,

April 4th, 19-.

Mr. Jerrold Robbins, Gilead Center, Conn.

MY DEAR MR. ROBBINS: 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 Robbins 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 $100 a year, it is yours. Any necessary repairs it may need I am willing to make. I have never seen the property myself, but whatever Miss Robbins 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,

"It's ours," Jean breathed thankfully.

"I always felt that it was, somehow," Mrs. Robbins smiled happily around at her brood. "And I know you'll like it, Jerry."

"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 Roxy'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, Betty, and get into it as soon as possible."

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

The goods had been brought up from Nantic by Hiram in the big hay wagon, he making four trips. Mrs. Robbins had wanted to hire an automobile truck from Norwich, but Roxana said it was all nonsense with two big horses standing idle in the barn just aching for work, and Hiram 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. Robbins went back and forth "settling."