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Page 8
He did not have to follow far to-day. Betty led the way across the road
to a plain little wooden church, set back in a grove of cedar-trees.
Behind the church was a graveyard, where they often strolled on summer
afternoons, through the tangle of grass and weeds and myrtle vines, to
read the names on the tombstones and smell the pinks and lilies that
struggled up year after year above the neglected mounds. But that was
not their errand to-day. A little red bookcase inside the church was the
attraction. Betty had only lately discovered it, although it had stood
for years on a back bench in a cobwebby corner.
It held all that was left of a scattered Sunday-school library, that had
been in use two generations before. Queer little books they were,
time-yellowed and musty smelling, but to story-loving little Betty,
hungry for something new, they seemed a veritable gold-mine. She had
found that no key barred her way into this little red treasure-house of
a bookcase, and a board propped against the wall under the window
outside gave her an easy entrance into the church. Here she came day
after day, when her work was done, to pore over the musty old volumes of
tales forgotten long ago.
In Betty's little room under the roof at home was a pile of handsomely
bound books, lying on a chest beside her mother's Bible. They were
twelve in all, and had come in several different Christmas boxes, and
each one had Betty's name on the fly-leaf, with the date of the
Christmas on which it happened to be sent. Underneath was always
written: "From your loving godmother, Elizabeth Lloyd Sherman."
Excepting a few school-books and some out-of-date census reports, they
were the only books in the Appleton house. Betty guarded them like a
little dragon. They were the only things she owned that the children
were not allowed to touch. Even Davy, when he was permitted to look at
the wonderful pictures in her "Arabian Nights," or "Pilgrim's Progress,"
or "Mother Goose," had to sit with his hands behind his back while she
carefully turned the leaves. Besides these three, there was "Alice in
Wonderland," and "�sop's Fables," there was "Robinson Crusoe," and
"Little Women," and two volumes of fairy tales in green and gold with a
gorgeous peacock on the cover. Eugene Field's poems had come in the last
box, with Riley's "Songs of Childhood" and Kipling's jungle tales.
Twelve beautiful books, all of Mrs. Sherman's giving, and they were like
twelve great windows to Betty, opening into a new strange world, far
away from the experiences of her every-day life.
She had read them over and over so many times that she always knew what
was coming next, even before she turned the page; and she had read them
to the other children so many times that they, too, knew them almost by
heart.
The little dog-eared books in the meeting-house proved poor reading
sometimes after such entertainment. So many of them were about
unnaturally good children who never did wrong, and unnaturally bad
children who never did right. At the end there was always the word
MORAL, in big capital letters, as if the readers were supposed to be too
blind to find it for themselves, and it had to be put directly across
the path for them to stumble over.
Betty laughed at them sometimes, but she touched the little books with
reverent fingers, when she remembered how old they were, and how long
ago their first childish readers laid them aside. The hands that had
held them first had years before grown tired and wrinkled and old, and
had been lying for a generation under the myrtle and lilies of the
churchyard outside.
Many an afternoon she had spent, perched in the high window, with her
feet drawn up under her on the sill, reading aloud to Davy, who lay
outside on the grass, staring up at the sky. Davy's short fat legs could
not climb from the board to the window-sill, and since this little
Mahomet could not come to the mountain, Betty had to carry the mountain
to him.
The reading was slow work sometimes. Davy's mind, like his legs, could
not climb as far as Betty's, and she usually had to stop at the bottom
of every page to explain something. Often he fell asleep in the middle
of the most interesting part, and then Betty read on to herself, with
nothing to break the stillness around her but the buzzing of the wasps,
as they darted angrily in and out of the open window above her head.
To-day Betty had read nearly an hour, and Davy's eyelids were beginning
to flutter drowsily, when they heard the slow thud of a horse's hoofs in
the thick dust of the road. Betty stopped reading to listen, and Davy
sat up to look.
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