Cousins -- Fiction; Prince Edward Island -- Fiction; Storytellers -- Fiction
“If you’d had to pay father for all the extra handfuls of wheat you’ve
fed to those hens, Miss Felicity, you wouldn’t have so much,” said Dan
spitefully.
“I didn’t,” said Felicity indignantly. “Look how Aunt Olivia’s hens
laid, too, and she fed them herself just the same as usual.”
“Never mind,” said Cecily, “we have all got something to give. If you
were like poor Sara Ray, and hadn’t been able to collect anything, you
might feel bad.”
But Sara Ray HAD something to give. She came up the hill after tea, all
radiant. When Sara Ray smiled--and she did not waste her smiles--she was
rather pretty in a plaintive, apologetic way. A dimple or two came
into sight, and she had very nice teeth--small and white, like the
traditional row of pearls.
“Oh, just look,” she said. “Here are three dollars--and I’m going to
give it all to the library fund. I had a letter to-day from Uncle Arthur
in Winnipeg, and he sent me three dollars. He said I was to use it ANY
way I liked, so ma couldn’t refuse to let me give it to the fund. She
thinks it’s an awful waste, but she always goes by what Uncle Arthur
says. Oh, I’ve prayed so hard that some money might come some way, and
now it has. See what praying does!”
I was very much afraid that we did not rejoice quite as unselfishly
in Sara’s good fortune as we should have done. WE had earned our
contributions by the sweat of our brow, or by the scarcely less
disagreeable method of “begging.” And Sara’s had as good as descended
upon her out of the skies, as much like a miracle as anything you could
imagine.
“She prayed for it, you know,” said Felix, after Sara had gone home.
“That’s too easy a way of earning money,” grumbled Peter resentfully.
“If the rest of us had just set down and done nothing, only prayed, how
much do you s’pose we’d have? It don’t seem fair to me.”
“Oh, well, it’s different with Sara,” said Dan. “We COULD earn money and
she COULDN’T. You see? But come on down to the orchard. The Story Girl
had a letter from her father to-day and she’s going to read it to us.”
We went promptly. A letter from the Story Girl’s father was always an
event; and to hear her read it was almost as good as hearing her tell a
story.
Before coming to Carlisle, Uncle Blair Stanley had been a mere name
to us. Now he was a personality. His letters to the Story Girl, the
pictures and sketches he sent her, her adoring and frequent mention of
him, all combined to make him very real to us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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