on ella’s side of the street, as well as on ida’s, interesting things were often going on. the mother and her friend were making wax flowers, and this was a delight to see. ella thought that the pink mossrose buds were the loveliest things in the world. the mother had brought with her some thin sheets of white wax, and out of these she cut the petals, using the real buds for patterns. some people made the petals of pink wax, but it was thought to be much more artistic to make them of white and paint them with pink powder.
these were pressed into the hollow of the hand and bent around the wire stem. real moss from the north side of the beech tree was twisted on at the base of the petals. leaves were made by dipping real rose leaves first into water, then into melted green wax and peeling off the impression of the under side to use. the rosebuds and the sprays of leaves were brought gracefully together, and there was the bouquet, all ready to take its stand in a little vase under a glass shade on the parlor mantel.
wax pond lilies, with long stems of green rubber, were also made. the stems were coiled upon a round piece of looking-glass to represent water. a glass[pg 52] shade in the shape of a half sphere was placed over them, finished with a chenille cord. “and there you have a thing that will always be an ornament for your parlor,” said the teachers of wax-flower-making. “it will never go out of fashion because it is true to nature.”
the two grown-ups were very kind to the smaller folk. they let them try and try until they had each made a really pretty bud and a spray of leaves to go with it. then they made some little forget-me-nots and some syringas. this was as much as they could find time for without neglecting their large families of dolls.
one day ella’s mother and her friend planned to go a little way out of the city to call on an old friend of theirs.
“put on your blue-and-white checked silk and your leghorn hat,” said the mother.
“do i have to go?” ella asked in dismay, for she and ida had some interesting plans for the afternoon.
“yes,” said her mother. “this lady is an old friend, and she will want to see you.”
“would she want to see me if she knew that i didn’t want to come?”
“i really can’t say about that,” said the mother with a smile, “but i’ll tell you something that i do know. i have noticed that when little girls do a thing because their mothers want them to, something pleasant is almost sure to happen before long.”
[pg 53]
ella did not know of anything pleasant that would be likely to happen in this call, and nothing did happen. the lady did not seem especially glad to see her. there was not a child or a cat or a dog to play with. there were a few books, but they were shut up in a tall bookcase with glass doors, and ella was almost sure that it would not do to ask if she might take one to read. she sat in a stiff chair by the window, thinking of what she and ida had meant to do. after a long, long time they said good-bye and started for home.
on the way ella picked up a little stone and asked her mother if it was a fossil.
“here’s a gentleman who will tell you,” said mother’s friend, and she introduced a tall man with white hair and deep blue eyes who was coming toward them.
“doctor,” she said, “here is a little girl who wants to know whether her stone is a fossil.”
“indeed,” said he with a kindly look at ella. “i am afraid it is not; but what does she know about fossils?”
“very little,” said her mother; “but even when she was very small, she was always bringing in pebbles and asking if they did not have names just as flowers did. her father told her the names of a few of the minerals that were most common about our home, and she is always looking for them.”
“i think i must give myself the pleasure of showing[pg 54] her my cabinets,” said the doctor. “not many little girls care for minerals. may i take her home with me now?”
then came a happy time. the doctor had great cases full of the most interesting minerals. he soon found that ella liked fossils and crystals especially, and as he showed them to her one by one, he told her stories of the places where he found them and of the fossils that were once living plants or animals a long, long time ago.
“was it before you were born?” ella asked, and wondered a little why he looked so amused when he answered yes.
when it was time for her to go home, the doctor gave her a real fossil, a piece of rose quartz, and a little deep red garnet. he walked home with her, and when he left her, he said:
“i am going away in the morning, but i shall send you before long a package of specimens marked with their names and where they were found. maybe some day we shall have a great mineralogist whose name will be ella. i take off my hat to the mineralogist of the future,” he said with a friendly smile.
ella was the happiest little girl in town. “he took off his hat to me just as if i had been a grown lady,” she told her mother.
the doctor kept his promise, and not long afterwards he sent her a package of fifty or sixty minerals, all marked as he had said they would be. ella wrote[pg 55] him a little letter, in her funny handwriting that looked as if it had been out in an earthquake, and told him how pleased she was to have them, and how much she liked to look them over. one thing puzzled her, however. the good doctor must have forgotten for a moment what a little girl she was, for he had put into the package a pamphlet that he had written for some learned society about the cacao tree. it was a thick pamphlet in the finest of print and with the lines very close together.
“i can’t tell him that i am glad to have this to read,” said ella in dismay, “for i’m not. what shall i do?”
“it was kind in him to send it to you,” her mother replied, “and you can thank him for his kindness. that will be perfectly honest. you need not tell him that you will enjoy reading it.”
ella was having a good time, but when night came, she was often a little homesick for the grandmother and the “real new hampshire,” and she did not grieve when she and her mother took the train for the mountains. she was very sorry to leave ida, but the mother had promised her friend to stop on her way home. ella had agreed to bring ida some maple sugar; and the two little girls said good-bye without any tears. they exchanged parting gifts. ella gave ida “minnie warren,” her very best paper doll, and ida gave ella a little book with a story in it that she had written. it was tied with a bright red ribbon,[pg 56] and on the cover was written, “the lost child, a true story made up by ida lester.”
after an hour in the cars, ella and her mother came to the most delightful part of the journey. the train stopped, then rushed on toward the north, leaving them standing beside a wharf that stretched out into a beautiful lake, blue as the sky and full of dainty little islands all rocks and trees and ferns. the lake seemed to have been dropped softly into a hollow among the mountains, for they were all around it, bending over it as if they loved it, ella thought.
a shining white steamboat was coming into sight around an island. it did not blow any whistle, but floated up to the wharf as gracefully as a swan, making only the gentlest of ripples in the blue water. this was the “lady of the lake.” ella thought the name had been given to the boat because it seemed so gentle and so ladylike.
they went on board, and as the steamboat made a wide curve away from the wharf and set out on her course across the blue water, roaming in and out among the islands, ella joyfully watched for the peaks that she knew best in the ranges that circled around the old homestead. from one point on the steamer’s course mt. washington could be seen for a few minutes. ella was looking for it eagerly when she saw a man with a harp coming up from the lower deck. a little girl followed him, and as he began to play, she sang in a sweet, clear voice.
[pg 57]
“mother,” ella whispered, “couldn’t i ever learn to sing like that? i’d rather do it than almost anything else in the world.”
the singing stopped and the man passed his hat around for money. ella looked at the little singing girl and found that the singer was looking at her.
“couldn’t i go and speak to her?” she asked, and her mother said, “yes, if you like. i think she looks rather lonely.”
so ella went up to the singing girl a little shyly and said:
“i think your singing is beautiful. i wish i could go about and sing and be on a boat always.”
“i heard you say to your mother that you were going to your grandmother’s, and i wished and wished that i had a grandmother and could go to see her and play like other children. i’d so much rather than to go about singing.”
but the father was beckoning to her to get ready to go ashore, and ella went back to her mother.
“i can see him! i can see him!” she cried. “and there’s the gray horse!”
one of her uncles always met them at the harbor. ella had caught sight of him on the wharf, and she had no more thought just then for the singing girl.
pretty soon they were seated in the wagon and were riding slowly along the road that wound higher and higher up among the hills to the old homestead. it was good to go slowly, ella thought, for every[pg 58] mountain and every tree seemed like an old friend, and it would hurt their feelings if she hurried past them.
there were two roads that found their way to “the west,” that is, the little village that was nearest to the homestead, and it was always a question which to choose. one led over a hill so high that it was almost a young mountain. indeed, when ella was smaller, she had fancied that if the road had not held it down like a strap, it would have grown into a mountain. the other road was shorter, but full of rocks, as if it had once been the bed of a river. the horse knew it well. he had learned just how to twist and turn among the rocks, and even if one wheel was a foot higher than another, there was no real danger of an overthrow, day or night.
upward they went, past tiny villages, little blue ponds, comfortable farmhouses, usually in charge of a big dog, who came out to the road and greeted them with a friendly wag of the tail; past meadows and mowing lots; beside “sap orchards” of maple trees; through deep woods, dark and cool even that warm summer afternoon; past the tiny red schoolhouse under the maples at the crossroads. ella had been there to school with an older cousin one day, and she thought that going to school and sitting at a desk must be the most delightful thing in the world. she had been allowed to sit, not with the little children, but, because she was company, on the high seats at[pg 59] the back of the room with the big girls. they were parsing in “paradise lost.” ella had no idea what either “paradise lost” or “parsing” might be, but she was sure it must be something very agreeable. they had carried their dinner in a tin pail; and this, she thought, was a wonderfully fine thing to do, for when noon came, they ate it under the trees just as if they were on a picnic. then they played in the brook and made playhouses, marking them out with white stones on the grass. they made wreaths of maple leaves, pinning them together with their long stems, and they pulled up long sprays of creeping jenny to drape over their playhouses at home.
but now they were on the crossroad that led to grandmother’s, and ella was getting much excited. “i know she will hear us when we go over the causeway,” she cried, “and she will come to the road to meet us;” and so it was, for two minutes later they could see the end of the house and the big asparagus bush standing under one of the west windows. half a minute more, and they were at the gate, and there stood grandma and grandpa, and the uncles and the aunts and the cousins, and such a welcome as there was! then came supper, with cottage cheese, made as no one but grandma could make it, custard pie, hot biscuit and maple syrup made from the sap of the very trees that they had just passed, and as many other good things as the table would hold.
after ella was curled up in bed that night, she said:
[pg 60]
“mother, i don’t believe i want to sing on a boat. i’d rather be a little girl at her grandmother’s. will you please take out my thick shoes? i shall be too busy to look for them in the morning.”
the mother went back to have a little talk alone with grandmother. she was sitting in her straight-backed rocking-chair. there were tears in her eyes. she looked up as the mother came in.
“the child looks more like her father every year,” said grandmother.
the mother nodded. her eyes, too, were full of tears, and she could not speak.
