Mary Ware's Promised LandJohnston, Annie F. (Annie Fellows)
General
Mary Ware's Promised Land
Johnston, Annie F. (Annie Fellows)
Young women -- Juvenile fiction
Pink Upham was one of the first to come in. He had been at the house
several times since his first call, and while some of his mannerisms
annoyed Mary even more than they had at first, she liked him better as
their acquaintance progressed. She could not help being pleased at the
attention he gave her slightest remarks. No girl can be wholly oblivious
to the compliment of having every word remembered, every preference
noted. Once, when they were looking at some soap advertisements, in a
most careless off-hand way she had expressed her dislike for strong
perfumes. Since then the odor of rose geranium was no longer noticeable
in his wake. Once she announced her admiration of a certain kind of
scarlet berry which grew a long distance up the mountain. The next day
there was a bunch of them left at her door. Pink had taken a tramp
before breakfast to get them for her.
There was a family discussion one night about celluloid. Nobody could
answer one of Mary's questions in connection with it about camphor gum,
and she forgot it almost as soon as it was asked, although she had
assumed an air of intense curiosity at the time. But Pink remembered. He
thought about it, in fact, as one of his chief duties in life to find
its answer, until he had time to consult Mr. Moredock's encyclopaedia.
At his last visit to the Wares he had seen a kodak picture of Mary,
taken at the Wigwam years before. She was mounted on the Indian pony
Washington. She wore short dresses then. Her wide-brimmed Mexican
sombrero was on the back of her head, and she was laughing so heartily
that one could not look at the picture without feeling the contagion of
her enjoyment. There was nothing she liked better than horseback riding,
she remarked as she laid the picture aside, but she had not tried it
since she was a child. That was one thing she was looking forward to in
her promised land, she told him, to owning a beautiful thoroughbred
saddle-horse, like Lloyd Sherman's.
Then Pink was shown "The Little Colonel's Corner," for the collection of
Lloydsboro Valley pictures were grouped in panels on one wall of the
Lone-Rock home as they had been at the Wigwam. First there was Lloyd in
her little Napoleon hat, riding on Tarbaby down the long locust avenue,
and then Lloyd on the horse that later took the place of the black pony.
Then Lloyd in her Princess Winsome costume, with the dove and the
spinning-wheel, and again in white, beside the gilded harp, and again as
the Queen of Hearts and as the Maid of Honor at Eugenia's wedding.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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