The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson (small books to read .TXT) 📕

his family to the picnic. All his army comrades would be there, and neighbors for thirty miles round, talking crops and prices, and the president’s troubles in Washington. It was to have been a grateful change from hoeing.

However, when the day came, it was out of the question to take Chirstie, who had been having fever, and the baby, who was unhappily teething, for a twenty-five mile ride through the heat, even with the new spring seat which Wully had bought for the wagon⁠—extravagantly, according to Alex McNair. John, therefore, rode away on horseback before dawn. Not that John would have condescended to care to go if it had been only what he would have called in our day a gathering of “neighborhood fatheads.” But there was to be a speaker there who helped to make laws and thwart the president in Washington, and John wanted to hear what he had to say, and how he managed to say it.

Wully and Chirstie accordingly began their holiday by a most unusually long sleep in the morning, the baby for some reason allowing it. They had a late and lazy breakfast. If Chirstie cared to, they would drive down to the creek and look for some blackberries, Wully said. He dallied about, playing with the baby, who was better than they had expected him to be. They sauntered out to their garden of little trees, after Wully had wiped the breakfast dishes, and spent some time there, weeding it, and cultivating it, playing together. Were not the two of them quite content to spend their holiday at home together now? It was not as if they were young, unmated things, running about experimentally, investigatingly. When it grew warm, and they sought the shade of the house to rest in, a Sabbath peace brooded over them. Wully stretched out on the grass, and the baby sat contentedly on his chest.

Chirstie looked at the morning glories blooming on the fence of the little vegetable garden. There were but few of them. The hens had got into the garden earlier and scratched them almost all out. She hated to kill the hens she had had the trouble of raising, just because they spoiled her morning glories. Her stepmother, she reflected, had no such hesitations. If a rash hen flew into Barbara McNair’s garden, she caught it and cut its wing feathers. If it repeated the offense, into the boiling kettle it went. She had scarcely a hen left. That famous wee white fowl-house was really little more than an ornament. Yet when Chirstie sighed over her morning glories, Wully said at once that he would get a better fence around a bigger garden by the next spring. He, too, was thinking of the McNair place. Everyone thought of that place that summer, and planned to make his own less desolate-looking. That McNairs’ was now the very showplace of the country. One driving up to it, unless he had heard reports, could scarcely believe his eyes. No sty now! No bony cows trampling knee-deep in mud! One saw a trim white house, inside a smart white fence, upon a jaunty rise of ground, with a gay white fowl-house in the rear, and in the front yard⁠—what sights for pioneer eyes! Crimson hollyhocks, just beginning to open, almost as high as the lean-to, screening the porch. A grapevine halfway across the main part of the building. Morning glories on cunning arrangements of hidden wires. Scarlet poppies and magenta petunias romping all along the front walk, laughing to the confederate heavens, flaunting their uselessness flippantly before the eyes of those who lived slavishly, blossoms with the Scriptures behind them to justify their toiling not, their spinning not, their being arrayed beyond kings’ glory⁠—not economically. The garden scouted the very principles of the hardworking, of those who would “get ahead.” It hooted aloud at frugality. Barbara McNair kept a lamb, to be sure, but for no utilitarian purpose. She kept it to mow her lawn. And when its hunger had shaved its environments, she moved the stake which held it, to another spot. She kept hens languidly, perhaps only to justify artistically that supernumerary luxury, the white fowl-house. But let those chickens beware how they turned their eyes towards her garden spaces, lest they discover fatally her feelings towards them and their like. No useless and ungardening orphan calf would she mother. No bereaved young pigs owed their life to her. She did only what she elected to do. Though there was at that time scarcely a servant girl west of the Mississippi, Barbara McNair was almost never without some neighbor girl to do her work for her, while in return she taught her sewing, or made some pretty garment for her. Just now Wully’s sister Mary, who was to marry a Yankee minister that fall, was working at the McNairs’, while Barbara, in spite of Isobel McLaughlin’s protests, was making her a famous blue silk dress, equaled in grandeur only by that red wool one of Chirstie’s. Always some girl or other eating that helpless McNair’s good bread, while his wife knit tidies, and watered her trifling wee flowers⁠—from a pump all painted and handy just outside the kitchen door⁠—and lived like a lady, envied by all the women in the neighborhood, and distrusted by nearly all the men.

Wully lay playing with the baby, who liked tickling his face with a long spear of grass, and thinking just how he would make that fence, and grinning, at times, to himself. The Sabbath before he had taken Chirstie home for dinner, and when she had seen how the flowers were blooming there, she had explained in vexation about her morning glories. Wully had been walking with his father-in-law and the women among the trifling flowers, when Chirstie had spoken of the accident, in answer to Barbara McNair’s question. And Alex had turned to Wully, and remonstrated with him for not having a better fence for Chirstie! A man ought