Children's Book Classics - Kate Douglas Wiggin Edition: 11 Novels & 120+ Short Stories for Children. Kate Douglas Wiggin
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but I suppose she’s tired sitting up and nursing a stranger. Mother wasn’t sorry when Gran’pa Perkins died; she couldn’t be, for he was cross all the time and had to be fed like a child. Why ARE you crying again, Rebecca?”
“Oh, I don’t know, I can’t tell, Emma Jane! Only I don’t want to die and have no funeral or singing and nobody sorry for me! I just couldn’t bear it!”
“Neither could I,” Emma Jane responded sympathetically; “but p’r’aps if we’re real good and die young before we have to be fed, they will be sorry. I do wish you could write some poetry for her as you did for Alice Robinson’s canary bird, only still better, of course, like that you read me out of your thought book.”
“I could, easy enough,” exclaimed Rebecca, somewhat consoled by the idea that her rhyming faculty could be of any use in such an emergency. “Though I don’t know but it would be kind of bold to do it. I’m all puzzled about how people get to heaven after they’re buried. I can’t understand it a bit; but if the poetry is on her, what if that should go, too? And how could I write anything good enough to be read out loud in heaven?”
“A little piece of paper couldn’t get to heaven; it just couldn’t,” asserted Emma Jane decisively. “It would be all blown to pieces and dried up. And nobody knows that the angels can read writing, anyway.”
“They must be as educated as we are, and more so, too,” agreed Rebecca. “They must be more than just dead people, or else why should they have wings? But I’ll go off and write something while you finish the rope; it’s lucky you brought your crochet cotton and I my lead pencil.”
In fifteen or twenty minutes she returned with some lines written on a scrap of brown wrapping paper. Standing soberly by Emma Jane, she said, preparing to read them aloud: “They’re not good; I was afraid your father’d come back before I finished, and the first verse sounds exactly like the funeral hymns in the church book. I couldn’t call her Sally Winslow; it didn’t seem nice when I didn’t know her and she is dead, so I thought if I said friend’ it would show she had somebody to be sorry.
“This friend of ours has died and gone
From us to heaven to live.
If she has sinned against Thee, Lord,
We pray Thee, Lord, forgive.
“Her husband runneth far away
And knoweth not she’s dead.
Oh, bring him back—ere tis too late—
To mourn beside her bed.
“And if perchance it can’t be so,
Be to the children kind;
The weeny one that goes with her,
The other left behind.”
“I think that’s perfectly elegant!” exclaimed Emma Jane, kissing Rebecca fervently. “You are the smartest girl in the whole State of Maine, and it sounds like a minister’s prayer. I wish we could save up and buy a printing machine. Then I could learn to print what you write and we’d be partners like father and Bill Moses. Shall you sign it with your name like we do our school compositions?”
“No,” said Rebecca soberly. “I certainly shan’t sign it, not knowing where it’s going or who’ll read it. I shall just hide it in the flowers, and whoever finds it will guess that there wasn’t any minister or singing, or gravestone, or anything, so somebody just did the best they could.”
III
The tired mother with the “weeny baby” on her arm lay on a long carpenter’s bench, her earthly journey over, and when Rebecca stole in and placed the flowery garland all along the edge of the rude bier, death suddenly took on a more gracious and benign aspect. It was only a child’s sympathy and intuition that softened the rigors of the sad moment, but poor, wild Sal Winslow, in her frame of daisies, looked as if she were missed a little by an unfriendly world; while the weeny baby, whose heart had fallen asleep almost as soon as it had learned to beat, the weeny baby, with Emma Jane’s nosegay of buttercups in its tiny wrinkled hand, smiled as if it might have been loved and longed for and mourned.
“We’ve done all we can now without a minister,” whispered Rebecca. “We could sing, God is ever good’ out of the Sunday school song book, but I’m afraid somebody would hear us and think we were gay and happy. What’s that?”
A strange sound broke the stillness; a gurgle, a yawn, a merry little call. The two girls ran in the direction from which it came, and there, on an old coat, in a clump of goldenrod bushes, lay a child just waking from a refreshing nap.
“It’s the other baby that Lizy Ann Dennett told about!” cried Emma Jane.
“Isn’t he beautiful!” exclaimed Rebecca. “Come straight to me!” and she stretched out her arms.
The child struggled to its feet, and tottered, wavering, toward the warm welcome of the voice and eyes. Rebecca was all mother, and her maternal instincts had been well developed in the large family in which she was next to the eldest. She had always confessed that there were perhaps a trifle too many babies at Sunnybrook Farm, but, nevertheless, had she ever heard it, she would have stood loyally by the Japanese proverb: “Whether brought forth upon the mountain or in the field, it matters nothing; more than a treasure of one thousand ryo a baby precious is.”
“You darling thing!” she crooned, as she caught and lifted the child. “You look just like a Jack-o’-lantern.”
The boy was clad in a yellow cotton dress, very full and stiff. His hair was of such a bright gold, and so sleek and shiny, that he looked like a fair, smooth little pumpkin. He had wide blue eyes full of laughter, a neat little vertical nose, a neat little horizontal mouth with his few neat little teeth showing very plainly, and on the whole Rebecca’s figure of speech was not so wide of the mark.
“Oh, Emma Jane! Isn’t he too lovely to go to the poor farm? If only we were married we could keep him and say nothing and nobody would know the difference! Now that the Simpsons have gone away there isn’t a single baby in Riverboro, and only one in Edgewood. It’s a perfect shame, but I can’t do anything; you remember Aunt Miranda wouldn’t let me have the Simpson baby when I wanted to borrow her just for one rainy Sunday.”
“My mother won’t keep him, so it’s no use to ask her; she says most every day she’s glad we’re grown up, and she thanks the Lord there wasn’t but two of us.”
“And Mrs. Peter Meserve is too nervous,” Rebecca went on, taking the village houses in turn; “and Mrs. Robinson is too neat.”
“People don’t seem to like any but their own babies,” observed Emma Jane.
“Well, I can’t understand it,” Rebecca answered. “A baby’s a baby, I should think, whose ever it is! Miss Dearborn is coming back Monday; I wonder if she’d like it? She has nothing to do out of school, and we could borrow it all the time!”
“I don’t think it would seem very genteel for a young lady like Miss Dearborn, who ‘boards round,’ to take a baby from place to place,” objected Emma Jane.
“Perhaps not,” agreed Rebecca despondently, “but I think if we haven’t got any—any—PRIVATE babies in Riverboro we ought to have one for the town, and all have a share in it. We’ve got a town hall and a town lamp post and a town watering trough. Things are so uneven! One house like mine at Sunnybrook, brimful of children, and the very next one empty! The only way to fix them right would be to let all the babies that ever are belong to all the grown-up people that ever are,—just divide them up, you know, if they’d go round. Oh, I have a thought! Don’t you believe Aunt Sarah Cobb would keep him? She carries flowers to the graveyard every little while, and once she took me with her. There’s a marble