"Sunny Boy, are you quite positive you feel all right?" asked Miss May
anxiously. "Do your eyes hurt you now? Don't you want me to walk home
with you?"
Sunny Boy said no, thank you, he felt all right and he didn't need her
to walk home with him.
Daddy Horton was home when Sunny Boy came in, for he had left his
office early. So he and Mother heard all about the fire before dinner,
and though Mother hugged him tightly and declared that he smelled of
smoke, she said she was glad her little boy had not been afraid.
"But the fireman was right," said Daddy Horton gravely. "Coats and
rubbers are not important enough, Sunny Boy, even if they were trimmed
with gold fur, to risk one's life for. I hope there'll be no more
fires till you are grown up and able to judge for yourself. But if
there should be, remember what the fireman said. That will keep you
from dashing into a blaze after foolish trifles."
Sunny Boy knew he would not forget, and then he went out into the
kitchen and told Harriet about the afternoon's excitement.
"And we never had the snowball fight at all," he said. "All the
bullets were made, too. Perhaps we can have it to-morrow."
But the next morning was rainy, and though there was plenty of cold
weather through February which followed, not once did it snow again.
There was not even much good skating, though Sunny Boy did enjoy one
afternoon with Bob Parkney, who declared that he would soon be a
champion skater with his new skates to help him. After that, though,
it thawed and froze and thawed and froze and the Centronia Park
Commission refused to allow any one on the ice. The children were
disappointed in the weather, but Miss May said she was glad to see it
rain. She had had enough snow, she said, till another year.
Bob stopped in once a week after school at the Hortons, to get the egg
container. He brought Mrs. Horton two dozen fresh eggs every Monday
morning from his mother's poultry yard, and Friday afternoon he came
for the box. Mrs. Parkney was so busy and happy now that she had
almost forgotten she had ever been discouraged. Judge Layton had put
the farmhouse in good order for her family, and he had stocked the
poultry yard with fine chickens. He said that if Mrs. Parkney would
feed the chickens and look after them till he came out in the summer,
she might have the eggs to do with as she pleased. The Parkney
children had all the fresh eggs to eat they wanted and there were
several dozen to sell every week, and Mrs. Parkney said she felt rich
with the egg money for her own.
Mr. Parkney's arm gradually grew stronger, and he was proving such a
handy man on the little farm, so willing and so capable, that Judge
Layton told Mrs. Horton that he was thinking of building a new house
and asking Mr. Parkney to go on living in the farmhouse and to be his
farm manager.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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