People of the Whirlpool, Mabel Osgood Wright [sneezy the snowman read aloud .txt] 📗

turn him loose in light woollen clothes, give him companions of his age, and let him alone."

"Can't you word it differently?" I asked.

"Why, is not that fairly direct?" he replied, looking surprised; "and surely the direct method is almost always the best."

"I think this is the one case where it is not, dear old Daddy. In fact, if you are destined, as I see that you are, to pick up and tie the threads of ravelled health in the Bluff Colony, you will have to become more complicated, at least in speech, accustomed as they are to a series of specialists, and having importance attached to the very key in which a sneeze is pitched.

"Those few words would savour to the Whirlpoolers of lack of proper respect and consideration. You must give a name to both ailment and cure if you expect to be obeyed. Call the case a 'serious one of physical suppression,' and the remedy the 'fresh earth cure,' to be taken only in light woollen clothes, tell them to report progress to you every other day, and you gain the boy his liberty."

Father laughed heartily, and his nose twitched in a curious way it has when he is secretly amused and convinced against his will; but I think he took my advice, at least in part, for the next morning Papa Vanderveer drove down in the brake, announcing in a shout that "De Peyster slept all night without waking up and crying, for the first time in months," adding, "And, Dr. Russell, if you've got anything further in this liberty line to suggest, even to getting rid of the Duchess, now's your time. 'The Duchess?' Ah, she is that confounded head nurse woman that Maria will keep so that things may be done properly, until the poor kid's nearly been done for, I say. The Ponsonbys are crazy to get the woman to break in their youngest girl and keep her down and from growing up until they marry the others off; so Maria could part with her in the light of a favour to them, don't you see, without spilling blood. Peysey'll have to have some sort of a chaser, though, or Maria'll not hear of it."

Mr. Vanderveer glowed all over with delight when father condemned the automobile as a nerve racker, and suggested that a young man of the companionable tutor order, who could either play games, fish, and drive with the boy and his chums, or at times leave him wholly alone, according to need, would be a good substitute for a woman who viewed life as a school of don'ts, and had either wholly outlived her youth, or else had most unpleasant recollections of it.

"I've got my innings at last," he said. "You're the first doctor I've had who hasn't sided with Maria and shut me out until pay day."

"I wonder why spring is such a restless season," I said half to myself and half to father, as I sat on the porch half an hour later, trying to focus my mind on writing to Lavinia Dorman, while father, lounging on the steps opposite, was busy reading his mail.

"One would think we might be content merely to throw off winter and look and enjoy, but no, every one is restless,--birds, fourfoots, and humans. Lavinia Dorman writes that Sylvia Latham has just started for California to see her brother, and she expects to bring her father back with her. The boys disappeared mysteriously in the direction of Martha Corkle's immediately after breakfast, Evan went reluctantly to the train, declaring that it seemed impossible to sit still long enough to reach the city, you are twisting about and shuffling your feet, looking far oftener at the river woods than at your letters, and as for myself, it seems as if I must go over yonder and seize Bertel's spade and show him how to dig those seed beds more rapidly, so that I can begin to plant and kneel down and get close to the ground. Yesterday when the boys came in with very earthy faces, and I questioned them, I found that they had stuck their precious noses in their mud pies, essaying to play mole and burrow literally."

"It is the same mystery as the sweating of the corn," replied father, gathering his letters in a heap and tossing them into a chair with a gesture of impatience; "none of us may escape, even though we do not understand it.

"It was years ago that I first heard the legend from an old farmer of the corn belt, who, longing for a sight of salt water, had drifted eastward into one of the little hill farms beyond the charcoal camp. He had been bedridden nearly all winter, but uncomplainingly, his wife and daughter-in-law caring for him, and it was not until the early part of May, when all the world was growing green, that he began to mend and at the same time groan at his confinement.

"I tried to cheer him up, telling him that the worst was over, and that he soon would be about again, and he replied: ''Tain't me that's doin' of it, Doctor, hit's the sweatin' of the corn. You know everywhere in May folks be plantin' corn, the time bein' the sign that frost is over and done with.' I nodded assent, and he continued: 'Now naterally there's lots of corn in ear and shelled and ground to meal that isn't planted, and along as when the kernels in the ground begins to swell and sprout, this other corn knows it and begins to heave and sweat, and if it isn't handled careful-like, and taken in the air and cooled, it'll take on all sorts of moulds and musts, and like as not turn useless. I holds it's just the same with folks,--when springtime comes they fetch up restless and need the air and turning out to sweeten in the sun until they settle down again, else their naturs turn sour, pisen'us, and unwholesome, breedin' worms like sweated corn!'

"Since then I've heard it here and there in other words, but always the same motive, the old miller holding it all fact and no legend at all, saying that if he can keep his surplus corn from sweating and well aired through May and June, he never fears for it in the damper, more potent August heat. One thing is certain, that in my practice in countryside, village, and town, if strange doings break out and restless discontentment arises, it is never in winter, when I should expect partial torpidity to breed unrest, but in the pushing season of renewal, and, as the old man terms it, 'corn sweating.'"

* * * * *

A little later I was going toward the garden when father called after me to say that he was soon starting for a long trip, quite up to Pine Ridge, and that if I cared to go, taking a lunch for both, it might give me a chance to "turn and sweeten" in the sun and cure my restlessness with natural motion.

Go? Of course my heart leaped at the very thought, because, in spite of the boys, those long drives with father have grown more precious as they grow more rare. But where were the twins? They had disappeared under my very eyes; of a surety they must be at Martha's, but my conscience smote me when, on glancing at the clock, I saw that it was two hours since they left the breakfast table in their brand-new sailor suits, with the intention of showing them to her.

No, they were not at Martha's, and she came hurrying back with me, a very clucking hen of alarm. Timothy Saunders, who had by that time brought round the horses in the stanhope, ventured the opinion that they might be below, paddling in the duck pond, as all the village children gathered there at the first warm weather, "jest fer all the world like gnats the sun's drawd oot."

They were not there! Father had disappeared to make some preparations for the drive, and so I asked Timothy to drive with me along the highway toward the village. I did not feel exactly worried, but then one never knows.

We had gone half a mile perhaps, vainly questioning every one, when I spied two small figures coming across a field from the east, where the ground fell lower and lower for a mile or so until it reached salt water.

"There be the lads!" shouted Timothy Saunders, as if I had been a hundred yards away, and deaf at that; but the noise meant joy, so it was welcome. "My, but they're fagged and tattered well to boot!" And so they were; but they struggled along, hand in hand, waving cheerfully when they caught sight of me, and finally crept through the pasture bars by which I was waiting, and enveloped me with faint, weary hugs. Then I noticed that they wore no hats, their fresh suits were grimy with a gray dust like cement, the knees of their stockings and underwear were worn completely through to red, scratched skin, and the tips entirely scraped from their shoes.

I gathered them into the gig, and sought the explanation as we drove homeward, Timothy hurried by the vision of tearful Martha, whom he had seen with the tail of his eye dodge into the kitchen, her apron over her head, as he turned out the gate.

"We've been playing we was moles," said Ian, in answer to the first question as to where they had been. "Yesterday we tried to do it wif our own noses, but we couldn't, 'cause it hurt, and we wanted to go ever so far."

"So we went down to where those big round stone pipes are in the long hole," said Richard, picking up the story as Ian paused. (Workmen had been laying large cement sewer pipes from the foot of the Bluffs, a third of a mile toward the marshes, but were not working that day, owing to lack of material.) "They made nice mole holes, so I crawled right in, and for a little it was bully fun."

"Oh Richard, Richard, what made you?" I cried, holding him so tight that he squirmed away. "Suppose the other end had been closed, and you had smothered in there, and mother had never found you?" for the ghastly possibility made my knees quake.

"Oh no, mother," he pleaded, taking my face between his grimy hands and looking straight in my eyes, "it wasn't a dark hole. I could see it light out 'way at the other end, and it didn't look so vely far as it was to crawl it. And after a little I'd have liked to back out, only--only, well, you see, I couldn't."

"Why not?" I asked, and, as he did not answer, I again saw a vision of two little forms wedged in the pipes.

"That _why_ was 'cause _I_ was in behind, and I _wouldn't_ back, and so Dick couldn't," said Ian. "You see, Barbara, I really, truly had to be a mole and get very far away, not to stay, only just for fun, you know," he added, as he saw signs of tears in his brother's eyes, and began to feel the smarting in his own bruised knees.

One blessed thing about Ian, even though he is sometimes passionate and stubborn, and will probably have lots of trouble with himself by and by, there