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Page 11
At this point the head keeper had to turn them all back instantly into
children, and she delivered a firm but gentle lecture on the
inconsiderateness of soaking a freshly changed bed.
Sandy broke into penitent tears; and because tears were never allowed
to dampen the atmosphere of Ward C when they could possibly be dammed,
Margaret MacLean did the "best-of-all-things." She pushed the cribs
and cots all together into a "special" with observation-cars; then,
changing into an engineer, and with a call to Toby to jump aboard, she
swung herself into the caboose-rocker and opened the throttle. The
bell rang; the whistle tooted; and the engine gave a final snort and
puff, bounding away countryward where spring had come.
Those of you who live where you can always look out on pleasant places,
or who can travel at will into them, may find it hard to understand how
wearisome and stupid it grows to be always in one room with an
encompassing sky-line of roof-tops and chimneys, or may fail to sound
the full depths of wonder and delight over the ride that Ward C took
that memorable day.
The engineer pointed out everything--meadows full of flowers, trees
full of birds, gardens new planted, and corn-fields guarded by
scarecrows. She slowed up at the barnyards that the children might
hear the crowing cocks and clucking hens with their new-hatched broods,
and see the neighboring pastures with their flocks of sheep and tiny
lambs.
"A ken them weel--hoo the wee creepits bleeted hame i' Aberdeen!"
shouted Sandy, bleeting for the whole pastureful.
And when they came to the smallest of mountain brooks the engineer
followed it, down, down, until it had grown into a stream with
cowslipped banks; and on and on until it had grown into a river with
little boats and sandy shore and leaping fish. Here the engineer
stopped the train; and every one who wanted to--and there were none who
did not--went paddling; and some went splashing about just as if they
could swim.
Back in the "special," they climbed a hilltop, slowly, so that the
engineer could point out each farm and pasture and stream in miniature
that they had seen close by.
"That's the wonder of a hilltop," she explained; "you can see
everything neighboring each other." And when they reached the crest
she clapped her hands. "Oh, children dear, wouldn't it be beautiful to
build a house on a hilltop just like this to live in always!"
Afterward they rode into deep woods, where the sunlight came down
through the trees like splashes of gold; and here the engineer
suggested they should have a picnic.
As Margaret MacLean stepped out into the hall to look up the
dinner-trays she met the House Surgeon.
"Dreading it as much as usual?" he asked, in the teasing, big-brother
tone; but he looked at her in quite another way.
She laughed. "I'm hoping it isn't going to be as bad as the time
before--and the time before that--and the time before that." She
pushed back some moist curls that had slipped out from under her
cap--engineering was hard work--and the little-girl look came into her
face. She looked up mischievously at the House Surgeon. "You couldn't
possibly guess what I've been doing all morning."
The House Surgeon wrinkled his forehead in his most professional
manner. "Precautionary disinfecting?"
Margaret MacLean laughed again. "That's an awfully good guess, but
it's wrong. I've been administering antitoxin for trusteria."
In spite of her gay assurance before the House Surgeon, however, it was
rather a sober nurse in charge of Ward C who sat down that afternoon
with a book of faery-tales on her knee open to the story of "The
Steadfast Tin Soldier." As for Ward C, it was supremely happy; its
beloved "Miss Peggie" was on duty for the afternoon with the favorite
book for company; moreover, no one had discovered as yet that this was
Trustee Day and that the trustees themselves were already near at hand.
A shadow fell athwart the threshold that very moment. Margaret MacLean
could feel it without taking her eyes from the book, and, purposefully
unmindful of its presence, she kept reading steadily on:
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