That House I Bought: A little leaf from lifeWarner, Henry Edward
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That House I Bought: A little leaf from life
Warner, Henry Edward
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Every day the little auburn-haired boy king in the House Next Door trots
out with his tiny red wagon and laboriously drags that treasure of
childhood up and down the pavement--sometimes prancing like a race
horse, sometimes plodding along like a mule that curses his ancestry,
sometimes ambling by like a good-natured family horse, guaranteed not to
run away or scare at an automobile!
And the little one--the baby in the go-cart. What a time the baby has
watching Big Brother, and admiring his strength as he performs miracles,
not only pulling and backing the tiny red wagon all by himself, but
actually turning it around and running the other way, without so much as
getting caught in the cracks or stuck in the sod! You can see
admiration fairly oozing from baby's eyes; and when he runs at her and
pretends to kick his heels into the dashboard, what a laugh she has!
Up the street, where the apartments are with the shiny sets of bells on
the front by the door, and the big rocking chairs and air of solid
comfort, there are some other children, but I haven't learned their
names. They play around the porch and front yard, and run across the
street, scampering up the hill to pick flowers from the lots that soon
will feel the plow; and their mothers keep an eye on them--not that any
accident could happen, for vehicles are scarce out our way and the
street car doesn't enter the quiet of our lives; but just
because--well, mothers are a bit peculiar that way--I mean that way of
keeping an eye on the young ones.
A fellow never knows what a remarkable head a child has, if he has none
of his own, until he begins borrowing babies from the neighbors.
There's Catherine, for instance. Catherine and Eleanor and I were
looking for the little pale anemones that hide around the roots of
trees. I picked some four-petaled blue flowers and instructed the
children.
"These," I said, "are forget-me-nots."
"No, they're not," said Catherine promptly. "They are bluettes.
Forget-me-nots have five petals and these have only four."
"Oh!" I said; "and where did you learn that?"
"My teacher told me, and she told me----" which ran into a long lecture
on botany and horticulture and forest-lore and things that made me
ashamed, for, frankly, I didn't know whether the tree that shaded us was
an oak or a maple. I think there should be a limit on male suffrage, and
woman domination, and child education. There are some things that make
the average man feel cheap, if he has pride.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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