Cousins -- Fiction; Prince Edward Island -- Fiction; Storytellers -- Fiction
Felicity tried--and had the most gratifying luck with--a new and
complicated cake recipe--a gorgeous compound of a plumminess to make
your mouth water. The number of eggs she used in it would have shocked
Aunt Janet’s thrifty soul, but that cake, like beauty, was its own
excuse. Uncle Roger ate three slices of it at tea-time and told Felicity
she was an artist. The poor man meant it as a compliment; but Felicity,
who knew Uncle Blair was an artist and had a poor opinion of such fry,
looked indignant and retorted, indeed she wasn’t!
“Peter says there’s any amount of raspberries back in the maple
clearing,” said Dan. “S’posen we all go after tea and pick some?”
“I’d like to,” sighed Felicity, “but we’d come home tired and with all
the milking to do. You boys better go alone.”
“Peter and I will attend to the milking for one evening,” said Uncle
Roger. “You can all go. I have an idea that a raspberry pie for
to-morrow night, when the folks come home, would hit the right spot.”
Accordingly, after tea we all set off, armed with jugs and cups.
Felicity, thoughtful creature, also took a small basketful of jelly
cookies along with her. We had to go back through the maple woods to
the extreme end of Uncle Roger’s farm--a pretty walk, through a world of
green, whispering boughs and spice-sweet ferns, and shifting patches
of sunlight. The raspberries were plentiful, and we were not long in
filling our receptacles. Then we foregathered around a tiny wood spring,
cold and pellucid under its young maples, and ate the jelly cookies;
and the Story Girl told us a tale of a haunted spring in a mountain glen
where a fair white lady dwelt, who pledged all comers in a golden cup
with jewels bright.
“And if you drank of the cup with her,” said the Story Girl, her eyes
glowing through the emerald dusk about us, “you were never seen in the
world again; you were whisked straightway to fairyland, and lived there
with a fairy bride. And you never WANTED to come back to earth, because
when you drank of the magic cup you forgot all your past life, except
for one day in every year when you were allowed to remember it.”
“I wish there was such a place as fairyland--and a way to get to it,”
said Cecily.
“I think there IS such a place--in spite of Uncle Edward,” said the
Story Girl dreamily, “and I think there is a way of getting there too,
if we could only find it.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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