A borrowed sister

All through this happy spring there was only one part of Lois’s life that she did not enjoy, and this was school; for it seemed such a waste of sunny hours, when the birds were singing and the trees were coming into leaf, and the seeds in the garden were beginning to sprout, to have to leave this delightful out-of-door world and shut one’s self up for hours in a stuffy room, and have tiresome lessons in numbers, or draw maps, or read aloud. The garden was altogether too interesting to leave. They could almost see the plants grow from day to day.

“There are a lot of queer things coming up in the middle of my bed, where I meant to plant my fuchsia,” said Lois one morning. “What can they be? They don’t look like weeds.”

“And I have some funny things in the centre of mine, too,” said Jessie, “just where I meant to put my scarlet geranium.”

“That’s a pretty thing,” said Lois.

“It looks as if it were going to be a cucumber vine,” said Jessie, who was something of a farmer, “but I don’t see how it could have got there.”

A few days later, the superior knowledge of Mrs. Page and Joe Mills, the gardener, was all that was needed to show that these intruders were cucumber vines, squash vines, and melons.

“Ellen must have planted them there,” said Lois. “Don’t you remember, when we went to Brierfield, she went down into the garden to find Minnie, and how she laughed afterwards, because she was so happy, she said? I knew it wasn’t that kind of a laugh.”

Lois could hardly wait until the next morning to see Ellen. Unluckily Ellen was a little late at school, and the other children were all in their seats when she came in very fast and flushed, as if she had run all the way. Ellen had a desk on the right-hand side of Lois now, and Lois looked across at her and smiled. She meant that smile to say, “I have so much to talk about at recess, that I can hardly wait.”

Ellen smiled too, then she cautiously took a piece of paper and a pencil out of her desk. She held them so that Lois could see them, and then partly covered them with her hand. As soon as Miss Benton was busy with one of the classes, Ellen handed the paper and pencil to Lois. “You can write whatever you have to say,” the action seemed to suggest.

Lois hesitated. She was a conscientious child and did not like to break one of the rules of the school, but her curiosity was very strong, and after a while it conquered her principles. She wrote, “Was it you who planted all those vegitables in our gardens? I think it was very funny, but mother made Joe Mills move them into the vegitable garden, all but one cucumber vine for each of us.”

The note was passed back without being detected by the teacher, and Ellen took another half sheet out of her desk. She sat lost in thought for a few moments, leaning her head on her hand. Finally, she seized her pencil and began to write very fast, as if fearing that her inspiration would leave her. Presently she handed the paper to Lois. Lois spread it open and glanced up furtively.

“Lois Page, is that a note that you have?” said Miss Benton severely. “Bring it straight to me. Any information that you have received will doubtless be of value to all of us.”

Lois read her note through hastily, before complying with her teacher’s request. It ran as follows:—

Lois was quite sure the information would not be useful to the school, and Miss Benton seemed to think so too, for when she had read the note she put it into her desk.

“You and Ellen can stay after school,” she said.

And then she began to tell the scholars about the reading of patriotic pieces that she planned to have on the Friday that came nearest to Decoration Day. She wanted each boy and girl to bring some piece about slavery or the civil war.

“We will have a preliminary reading next week Friday,” she said, “and we will then choose the two best readers, those who have the fewest criticisms, to head the different sides, and select six or eight others to take part in a programme which you can all invite your parents to attend.”

Lois felt a joy in this announcement, mixed with a fear. She was sure she was one of the best readers, and hoped she might be chosen to head a side. And yet what a trial it would be to have to stand on the platform and face, not only the scholars, but also a group of mothers, and still worse, fathers! The children could talk of little else for the next day or two, and Lois made her mother’s life a burden until she found something for her to read. The choice finally fell on “Barbara Frietchie.”

Jessie had settled what her selection should be the moment the plan was suggested. She meant to read Whittier’s “Astræa at the Capitol: Abolition of Slavery in the District of Columbia, 1862,” a poem that her father was very fond of and had read to her more than once.

Ellen browsed in her father’s library, and made his life a torment to him until he had got down a row of green volumes for her, and patiently helped her choose a poem. He advised first one thing and then another, and after all, Ellen made her own selection. She became fascinated by a poem of Longfellow’s called “The Slave in the Dismal Swamp,” and she went around the house reading it in blood-curdling tones.

Lois, meanwhile, was driving her mother to the verge of madness by insisting upon reading “Barbara Frietchie” to her half a dozen times a day. Jessie, on the other hand, read her poem over in solitude.

Lois tried first one way of reading and then another.

she repeated dramatically. “Mother, do you think I ought to bow my head when I read that, or shake it from side to side?”

She looked so very far from the gray-haired Barbara, as she gave her head first a nod and then a shake, that Mrs. Page burst into unfeeling laughter.

“Mother, I think it is too bad of you to laugh,” Lois protested. And presently she came to the lines,

“Mother, do you think I made my voice deep enough? Did it sound like a man’s? I think it is better to read in different voices, don’t you?”

Mrs. Page was almost hysterical now. “My dear child, you read a great deal better two days ago, before you had this craze for the dramatic. Just read straight ahead in your natural voice, and perfectly simply.”

“But, mother, you ought to hear Ellen read the hunted negro in the Dismal Swamp, and the bloodhound’s curdling cry! It sends cold shivers down your back.”

“Luckily, Ellen’s reading is not my responsibility. If it were, I should pass into an early grave, between you.”

As the day for the preliminary reading approached, Lois grew more and more nervous. She read “Barbara Frietchie” over six times on Thursday: twice to Jessie, three times to her mother, and when Mrs. Page’s patience finally gave out, she selected Maggie for a victim, and going out into the kitchen, she read the whole poem through to her.

She had finally decided not to make any gesture at this point.

“Isn’t that great, Maggie?” she asked.

Maggie was so much impressed, that it almost decided Lois to adopt the dramatic manner, in spite of her mother’s counsels.

Friday afternoon came at last, and then the awful space of time that preceded her own reading, when Lois sat trembling in her seat, as the children were called on alphabetically. Oh, why did not her name begin with one of the first letters in the alphabet, like fortunate Dora Robertson’s, who stood up and read a spirited war piece in a mouse-like voice, and then sat down with the pleased expression of the martyr whose sufferings are quickly over. Ellen Morgan came next. She walked to the platform with the brave exterior of the general preparing for battle.

To say that the reading of “The Slave in the Dismal Swamp” produced a distinct sensation, is to put it mildly. Whatever Ellen’s faults of delivery might be, there was a passion of earnestness about her, an entire forgetfulness of herself, that turned the smile that came at first into respectful attention, and then admiration. As the children listened, it seemed as if they could see the hunted negro, and hear with him the horse’s tramp and the bloodhound’s distant bay.

When Ellen sat down, there were tears in her eyes, and there were tears in Miss Benton’s eyes, too.

“How had Ellen done it?” Lois asked herself. It was all so very simple, but Lois had a conviction in her heart that she herself, if she were to read “Barbara Frietchie” over a hundred times, for as many days, could never equal the simple pathos of Ellen’s voice.

Ethel Smith, Edward Cory, Gertrude Brown, and other girls and boys followed, but no one began to approach Ellen. Finally Jessie’s turn came. Lois had heard her read her poem only once. Jessie went up on the platform with the same quiet dignity with which she did everything. Lois thought how very lovely she looked in her new lilac gingham frock.

Jessie had a voice that was like music, and the poem she read with the utmost simplicity was so beautiful that the children were as quiet as if they were in church.

Lois looked out of the window at the flag on the flagstaff, as it gently floated in the breeze. It suddenly came over her, as no lesson in history had ever taught her, what the civil war had meant. First there was Ellen’s slave, and then the war had come and made him free. There was a little catch in her throat, and she saw the flag now through a blur of tears.

Joel Carpenter came next; and as there were no K’s in school, Lois’s turn would come afterwards. She clutched her book, and her heart began to beat very fast. It seemed no longer of any use to try to read, for no one else had begun to do as well as Ellen and Jessie. Then Lois thought of Maggie and her honest enthusiasm. The thought of Maggie gave her courage as she walked across the school-room floor and mounted the platform. For one moment her heart failed her, and then she made up her mind that she would read “Barbara Frietchie” as she had never read it before. She opened her book nervously and glanced down at the printed page, then she made a flurried bow and prepared to read, but the words that met her astonished gaze were “Cobbler Keezar’s Vision.” For a moment she was half dazed, then she recognized the horrible truth that she had lost her place. She turned the leaves hastily. In the confusion of the moment she had forgotten in what part of the book “Barbara Frietchie” lay hidden. “To Englishmen,” “The Preacher,” “The Tent on the Beach,”—she turned hastily to the table of contents, but even there “Barbara Frietchie” seemed to take a teasing pleasure in keeping herself unrevealed. Here she was at last,—“Barbara Frietchie,” page 279.

Lois made another bow, a bow of humiliation, and then she began to read. All the joy of the day had gone for her, and all the hope of outshining Ellen and Jessie. She could hardly find her voice. She could hear herself going over the pages with the mouse-like quiet with which Dora Robertson had read. When she came to—

Lois read the words faintly, as if poor Barbara’s spirit had been completely quenched by her strenuous day; and she made Stonewall Jackson say,—

in the gentle voice of a lady ordering a cup of tea. It was all too terrible, but she got through it somehow, and when she made another bow at the end, and finally sank into her seat, the only comfort she could find in life was the certainty that this horrible ordeal would not have to be repeated on the following Friday, for no one with a thinking brain could put her reading among the first ten.

When every one had finished, even Reuben Morgan, who came at the end of the school alphabet, and who, to Lois’s comfort, read in the same poor-spirited way in which she had, the criticisms of the reading began.

Lois hardly heard what the children said, until her attention was caught by a few words in Ethel Smith’s critical, clear-cut tones, “Lois Page made three bows.”

Ellen and Jessie were unanimously chosen to head the sides. Lois felt that she ought to be glad that her two best friends had this honor, but she could be glad of nothing now; she could only wish that she could hide her head forever in some spot far from the light of day.

As Lois and Jessie turned in at the gate, they saw Mittens sitting on the front doorstep, in a calm, unruffled way.

“You are always lucky in everything that happens to you, Jessie,” said Lois. “I wish I had a witch kitten.”