Mary Cary: "Frequently Martha"Bosher, Kate Langley
General
Mary Cary: "Frequently Martha"
Bosher, Kate Langley
Children -- Juvenile fiction; Orphans -- Juvenile fiction
When I first came back from the hospital my little old sticks of legs
wouldn't hold me up, and down I would go. But I didn't mind that. I just
minded not going to sleep at night. But sleep wouldn't come, and I'd
get so wide awake trying to make it that I began to have a teeny bit of
fever again, and then it was Miss Katherine asked if she might take me
in her room. I was nervous and still needed attention, she said,
and--magnificent gloriousness!--I was sent to her room to stay until
perfectly well, and I'm here yet. Perfectly well because I am here!
That first night when I got into the little white bed next to her bed,
and knew she was going to be there beside me, I couldn't go to sleep
right off. I kept wishing I was King David, so I could write a book of
gratitudes and psalms and praises, and that was the first night I ever
really prayed right. I didn't ask for a thing except for help to be
worth it--the trouble she was taking for just little me, a charity
child. Just me!
And oh, the difference in her room and the room I had left! She had had
it painted and papered herself, for it hadn't been used since kingdom
come, and the cobwebs in it would have filled a barrel. It had been a
packing-room, and when Miss Katherine first saw it she just whistled
soft and easy; but when she was through, it was just a dream.
It is a big room at the end of the wing, and it has three windows in
it: one in the front and one in the back and one opposite the door you
come in. And when the paper was put on you felt like you were in a great
big garden of roses; pink roses, for they were running all over the
walls, and they were so natural I could smell them. I really could.
Miss Katherine brought her own furniture and things, and she put a
carpet on the floor, all over, not just strips. And the windows had
muslin curtains at them with cretonne curtains just full of pink roses,
looped back from the muslin ones; and the couch and the cushions and
some chairs were all covered with the same kind of pink roses. And as
for the bed, it was too sweet for anybody to lie on--that is, for
anybody but Miss Katherine to lie on.
There was a big closet for her clothes, and a writing-desk which had
been in the family a hundred years--maybe a thousand. I don't know. And
one side of the room was filled with books in shelves which old Peter
Sands made and painted white for her. She lets me look at them as much
as I want, and says I can read as many as I choose when I am old enough
to understand them. She didn't mention any time to begin trying to
understand, and so I started at once, and I've read about forty already.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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