"It's Joyce's turn," was the only answer Lloyd would make.
"And my dream was positively brilliant," replied Joyce. "I thought we
were all at The Beeches, and Allison, and Kitty, and all of us were
making Limericks. Kitty began:
"'There was a lieutenant named Logan,
Who found one day a small brogan.'
Then she stuck, and couldn't get any farther, and Allison had to be
smart and pun on my name. She made up a line:
"'So what will Joyce Ware if she meets a great bear?'
Nobody could get the last rhyme for awhile, but after floundering around
a few minutes I had a sudden inspiration and sprang up and struck an
attitude as if I were on the stage, and solemnly thundered out:
"'And how can he shoot him with _no_ gun?'
"In my dream it seemed the most thrilling thing--I was the heroine of
the hour, and Lieutenant Logan took me aside and told me that the
question which I had embodied in that last line was the question of the
ages. It had staggered the philosophers and scientists of all times.
Nobody could answer that question--'how can he shoot him with no gun,'
and he was a better and a happier man, to think that I had rhymed that
ringing query with the proud name of Logan. It's the silliest dream I
ever had, but you can't imagine how real it seemed at the time. I was so
stuck up over his compliments that I began flouncing around with my head
held high, like the picture of 'Oh, fie! you haughty Jane.'"
"Oh, Joyce, what a dream to dream on wedding-cake!" exclaimed Mary, with
a long indrawn breath. There was no mistaking her interpretation of it.
Everybody laughed, and Joyce hastened to explain, "It isn't worth
anything, Mary. It'll never come true, for just before I came
down-stairs to breakfast I discovered my little box of cake lying on the
table under a pile of ribbons. It had been there all night. I had
forgotten to put it under my pillow. And," she added, cutting short
Mary's exclamation of disappointment, "_your_ box lay beside it. We both
were so busy putting away our dresses, and talking over the wedding that
we forgot the most important thing of all."
"Well, I'm certainly glad that mine wasn't under my head when I had that
dreadful nightmare!" exclaimed Mary, in such a relieved tone that every
one laughed again. "I couldn't help taking it as a warning."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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