New England -- Description and travel -- Juvenile fiction
"I do," agreed Mary Jane, "unless," she added, thoughtfully, "unless
eating in the garden or seeing the goldfishes or swimming or playing
with John or—well, we’ve done a lot of nice things, Mother, but swan
boats are my favorite, I guess."
Hal’s taxi was chugging briskly when they reached the street and they
dashed off to take their train for home.
"Now there’s a whole day to ride without getting off or hurrying or
anything," said Mary Jane luxuriously, as she settled herself in the
comfortable sleeper and leaned back against the cushions with a deep
sigh of satisfaction. "I just _love_ riding on a train, I do, Mother."
It _was_ fun to sit quietly and watch the towns dash by. For ten busy
days Mary Jane had been the one to do the going, hurrying from one good
time to another and now it seemed the best fun of all to sit still and
think about all the fun she had had.
In an hour though, she began to want something to do. Alice, deep in a
book, was close by, while her mother and Uncle Hal, who seemed to have
an endless amount to say to each other, were just across the aisle.
Should she bother them—or what should she do?
Suddenly she remembered! She had brought something for just such a
time, and so busy had she been all the days in New England that she
hadn’t once thought of what she had carried around. She slipped her
hand back of her till she touched her own little handbag that was on the
seat between herself and Alice, opened it and spread out on her lap her
precious paper dolls.
Mrs. Merrill, glancing across to see that her little girl was all right,
saw what she was doing and said, "Press the button there between the
windows, dear, and the porter will bring you a table to spread the dolls
out on."
Five minutes later Mary Jane had a table all to herself and on it spread
her whole paper doll family. All the time the great train sped through
Massachusetts, she played with them, acting over again the Harvard Class
Day parties, the tea party in Mrs. Burn’s pretty garden and many other
things that she herself had done on her trip.
At five-thirty they went to the diner for dinner, and Mary Jane had some
good chicken and hashed-brown potatoes and apple dumplings with ice
cream, before she went back to finish playing with her dolls.
"I think paper dolls are the nicest dolls for on a train, I do," she
told her mother, as together they neatly tucked the dolls away for a
night’s rest in the handbag, "’cause they don’t break and they don’t
take up a lot of room, and I can have them all along—every one of them."
Mr. Merrill met his family at the station the next day, and there was a
happy reunion and a lot of talk about the fun they had had since they
last saw him.
"But nobody asks me what _I’ve_ been doing?" he exclaimed with mock
grief at the first pause in the conversation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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