Memoirs: Life on the Farm for the Seven Jordan Sisters 1890 to 1919

Memoirs

Life on the Farm for the Seven Jordan Sisters

1890 to 1919

By Ella Pearl Jordan Dale

Copyright 2016 Carolyn Dale

Publisher Smashwords Edition

Print Edition Copyright 1996 – Eugene J. Dale, Barbara D. Thompson, and Carolyn Dale

(Portions of this work were copyrighted in 1980 by Eugene J. Dale and Barbara D. Thompson)

Thank you for downloading this book. This book remains the copyrighted property of the editor, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer; thank you for your support. Passages of this work may be quoted with permission; please write to Carolyn@carolyndale.com

E-Book Edition ISBN: 9781310524608

Table of Contents

Foreword to the 2016 Edition

Introduction

Characters

Prologue

Chapter 1 Buying the Farm; Birth of the Daughters, 1890-1899

Chapter 2 The New House, 1899

Chapter 3 Trip to the Post Office

Chapter 4 Bees

Chapter 5 Chores

Chapter 6 Buying the Organ, 1903

Chapter 7 Cornbread and Mr. Hunt

Chapter 8 Erysipelas, 1903

Chapter 9 The Garden and the Creeks

Chapter 10 School

Chapter 11 Dan Shaner

Chapter 12 Wild Horses

Chapter 13 Gum; Tooth-pulling

Chapter 14 Uncle Thomas' Leg Broken

Chapter 15 Flower Picking; Cougar Hunt; Sheep Kill

Chapter 16 Andy Swofford Fishing; Telephone

Chapter 17 Trip to Town

Chapter 18 Day at Church

Chapter 19 Coming of the Three Girls

Chapter 20 Field Work with the Team

Chapter 21 Tricks

Chapter 22 Milking; The Separator

Chapter 23 Clearing the Land

Chapter 24 Diphtheria, 1910

Chapter 25 Walking to School

Chapter 26 The Car

Chapter 27 High School

Chapter 28 Birth of Baby

Chapter 29 The Hospital

We Model T'd to Yellowstone

My Summer in a Herring Saltery

Appendix 1 A History by Ella's Sisters

Appendix 2 The Family and Farm in Historical Perspective

Appendix 3 Legal Description of the Farm

To the adventurous spirit in all of us.

Foreword to the 2016 edition

This edition of Ella Pearl Jordan Dale’s memoir adds photographs and two stories to the earlier print edition from 1996. It also draws together the creative efforts of a number of people in addition to the main author.

Before her death in 1974, Ella gave the chapters for this book to her granddaughter Carolyn Dale to finish it or do something with it. She also left short stories and copious notes not yet shaped into chapters. Carolyn organized the materials into the present shape of the Memoirs.

Ella’s son, Eugene J. Bud Dale, sequenced the chapters to closely follow the periods of Ella's life with her family, and he edited details for accuracy. He also keyboarded the handwritten and typed pages into digital files and collected and organized the family photos for both editions. His wife, Mary Dale, also did keyboarding and proofreading, and they handled arrangements for printing the first edition.

For this electronic edition, Ella’s granddaughter Jan (Dale) Koutsky reformatted the digital files for the text. She also scanned, edited and enhanced photos, wrote captions, and designed the new artwork appearing on the cover.

The family owes a debt of gratitude to Ella’s daughter Barbara (Dale) Thompson for the photos taken from the family albums, which she assembled and maintained. Barbara also helped to fill in important family dates from her extensive genealogy research and records, before her death in 2007.

This edition includes two short stories that Ella wrote, which did not appear in the 1996 edition: We Model T’d to Yellowstone, and My Summer in a Herring Saltery. Though Ella wrote additional stories that do not appear, the family felt these two carry on the flavor and perspectives of the overall Memoirs and belong with these chapters.

Three appendixes at the end of this volume offer more historical perspective for Ella’s memoir. The first is compiled from round-robin letters written by four of her sisters over a period of several years following her death. Their comments, which previously appeared as two appendixes but now are edited into one, provide their perspectives and colorful details for incidents Ella recounted.

The second appendix takes an academic approach to placing the Jordan family’s migration to Washington and life as early setters within a historical framework. Mike Vouri did significant background research related to Ella’s Memoirs while pursuing history studies at Western Washington University. The appendix draws from his thesis, which was advised by Dr. Roland (Larry) DeLorme.

The third appendix provides the legal description for the Jordan family’s land. This may be helpful for future generations wanting to locate the site, now partially covered by a lake.

In the twenty years since the print edition, American English usages have evolved further from some of the forms Ella used in her writing. So this edition updates a few instances of spelling and grammar where the original forms could cause confusion. For example, plough is now plow; oftimes is often; and tho and altho are spelled out. Also, that replaces which for restrictive clauses. Otherwise, I have tried to leave intact the language that so well expresses Ella’s voice as a storyteller.

The family hopes that this volume will prove useful to researchers and historians, as well as enjoyable for descendants, relatives, and family friends.

Eugene J. Bud Dale, editor, 1996 print edition, and

Carolyn Dale, editor, 2016 electronic edition

Introduction

There is family myth: that my great-grandparents came out from Texas in a covered wagon and took a homestead in southern Washington, where they built a log house, raised seven daughters, farmed, built a beautiful Victorian house, worked, died, and left the land to their daughters, one of whom farmed it with her husband until it was confiscated by Tacoma City Light and was flooded behind a dam.

Then there is fact: that my great-grandparents rode out here on a train with their two eldest daughters, following a bevy of relatives, and joined them in a land-buying sweep in the Cowlitz River valley.

Charles Jordan first bought 80 acres from a speculator, for $800 in 1890, at 24 percent interest, and bought the second 80 acres for $1,500 at 10 percent interest. The next four daughters were born in the log home, but in 1890 the new house was done, financed by an inheritance to my great-grandmother.

They were land poor. The other relatives gave up and went back to Texas, or on to California. Charles and Mabel farmed. Charles was a thin, nervous man, high-strung and hard-working. He cleared the land with his team of horses, nearly killed himself, and in the process, destroyed a fortune in cherrywood and cascara bark. He died at the age of 55 after his second stroke. He was Irish, and blue-eyed. Mabel was the sensible one, the manager, who kept the books. She lived until 1941.

My grandmother Ella was the fifth of the daughters. She was born December 30, 1894, and died December 8, 1974, just twenty-two days short of her eightieth birthday. She worked on this book for about 30 years, amassing it slowly, giving it up often, returning to it always after lengthy soul-searching, with the final decision it was the Lord's will that I should write this book. The sisters helped by writing some of their recollections in the round-robin letters. Fragments of the letters survive. Ella typed drafts on the backs of letters, or clipped out, here and there, a paragraph, written by some sister in now-faded blue ink.

Ella completed the second draft. She thought the book should be a novel, and slightly reshaped some facts for that purpose. But she became frustrated with her creation because it was too true to life: There were episodes, many episodes, and aging, and a world that expanded for the sisters from the muddy banks of Sulphur Creek to Mossyrock and then to Chehalis, to Seattle and Bellingham, and then to other states, the East Coast, and even to world travel. But there was no single plot line, slowly building. It was just .... their lives. And my grandmother frequently said, Folks won't want to read this!

But that way of life passed. Tacoma City Light took the land. It would be partially covered with backwater from another dam on the Cowlitz River. The pasture land, cleared by muscle and horse power over years, and tilled and grazed until it was of finest quality, was best suited, the utility decided, for being covered shallowly with water as a fish-rearing pond. But it was too warm—the fish died.

This end to The Farm was a seal on the past. It was an impetus for finishing the book. We the grandchildren could not go to the farm anymore, as to a museum. The way of life had passed bit by bit. Gone were the three-day trips to Chehalis 26 miles away, made in Studebaker wagons, several teams at a time, so they could pull each other out of the pot holes in the muddy road; the annual shopping trip for calico and one slate and pencil for each girl for the year; roasting and grinding peas for coffee; Mabel swathing herself in netting to smoke out the bees so she could place the square honeycomb in the round dish where it never quite fit; the heads of the girls shining, bowed, under the oil lamp for dinner on a winter evening; the annual Baptist conventions and footwashings in the icy creek; the roaming cougars; the painful and bizarre remedies dictated by the home medicine book; the terrifying nights of diphtheria, spent waiting for a doctor to come by horseback over the mountains via bad roads and the flooded river on the shaky suspension bridge. It was passing when the roads were paved, when the new high school was built at Mossyrock, when Charles installed telephone lines, and when my grandmother backed the new Model T out of the garage and taught herself to drive.

And only when it was gone did Ella realize she had lived through a unique and brief part of Washington history: its settlement. As a girl, she said, she used to think how wonderful it must have been to be a pioneer—without realizing she was one, herself.

I visited the farm once. All of the grandchildren did. My parents took us down from Seattle for a weekend. I don't remember too much, just a string of vivid scenes, which now that The Farm is gone, I play back in my mind frequently, to check that they all are there. We were mystified by the water pump on the back porch. We couldn't get it to work until my father told us about priming it. The wooden telephone box hung on the wall and rang in a specific combination of long and short for each neighbor on the line.

In the evening we sat in the parlor and watched the Lawrence Welk Show while friends and neighbors dropped by. Then we hid in the loft of the barn and watched through the trap door while the veterinarian cornered an angry bull long enough to plunge a hypodermic into him.

We played about the barn and creek and fields and woods. I swung on the rope swing in the barn with sunlight slanting through the cracks, lighting gold the hay-dusty air, soaring up and down, alone. Ten years later I read in her manuscript how she remembered swinging through the slatted flashing sunlight, the motes of gleaming dust, one morning on a brief escape from her sisters and the chores. And I knew I had been there, in the same place, that moment, precisely.

Those were the pleasures, then. Her favorite recreation was a solitary walk, an hour in the boughs of a tree with a book, a secret, sheltered opening in the woods. The girls did much of the work on the farm. I remember my grandmother wringing out by hand clothes that my mother had just wrung, exclaiming, You can get more water out than that!, and with some incredible strength of her arms and hands, sending out rivulets of water from the tightly-twisted clothes, the streams running down her wrists and into the sink.

She was tough-minded, too. I was afraid of her as a child because I could not cajole or persuade her. It didn't work. The other grandparents were inclined to slip us treats, and dimes if we were good, with warnings, Don't tell your mother! But she always regarded us levelly, asked us the reasons behind our actions, asked for our thoughts, and set on us squarely the responsibility for ourselves. One time I stayed with her, just myself, for a week, until persuaded to return home. I feasted on green grapes and graham crackers, finishing the entire box. Each time I asked for more crackers, she asked if I was sure I wanted them. I said I was, so when the stomach ache came, she gave no sympathy. One accepted the consequences for what one did. That was just ... life. I wasn't used to being treated like an adult.

She liked to play Scrabble and checkers, and I spent afternoons trying to beat her at the latter. One day she looked up from the board, straight at me, where I sat on so many piled-up pillows, and asked if I preferred to play the game honestly or if I liked to be allowed to win. I don't know what I said, but I remember squirming in hot shame at her candid assessment that I wasn't clever enough yet to win on my own. I never did beat her at either game.

She did her voluminous letter-writing and her agonized periods of book-writing in the corner of the dining room. This was built on like a wing to the house with a bank of windows looking west over Puget Sound and another looking south, mainly into the branches of the fir and hazelnut trees. The typewriter rested on a small table her husband, Charles Dale, had made just for that. It had a green felt covering on the top and a small flat drawer. After she died, this table came to my parent's house, and one day I had run my fingers across the green felt, caught sight of the little drawer, and opened it. Inside were dozens of pencil stubs. Stubs only a few inches long, which she would use down to the last nub of lead before discarding. But I didn't throw them away, either. I've been using them up, gradually. Some things, I guess, are just in your bones.

When we came to dinner and sat around the heavy, dark mahogany table, with its carved legs, we'd see, next to the buffet, the grey-green cover on the typewriter and nearby a hastily straightened stack of paper. So we'd always ask how the writing was going. She left me about two dozen short stories, along with this book. She admired O. Henry's short stories, and strived in her own for the pithy punchiness and twist at the end. A red-silk bound set of O. Henry stories stood between its own bookends in her house. She had a blue silk-bound set of the complete works of Mark Twain. That is how I read Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer and the others, lolling on the grass under the fruit trees, near the birdbath, on summer days. She always left me alone when I read, and even when I had shut the book and was just dreaming, staring out at the sea or up through the leaves and the sun, or wandering up and down the rows of corn, musing, or hiding to snitch raw peas.

She'd come out to the garden then, though, and we'd snap beans or shell peas together. They had a double lot in Seattle, and the back part was in vegetable garden bounded by a row of raspberries. They always had a garden, and I worked the garden with her that last summer. She taught me how it's done.

After I had kept my own garden, I suddenly understood why she laid out a dozen little plates of fresh vegetables when she had guests for dinner. She simply was putting out the food that was ripe that day. But this was a custom from The Farm, to sit down to dinner before a panoply of cut-glass dishes each with its wet, vine-ripened vegetable.

She had the oil lamp from the farm. It hung there in the dining room, though they had wired it for electricity. It had a great chimney and strips of metal in spirals and curlicues, and we ate under it, with it shining on our heads.

My grandmother also ate some Southern food. Her mother's people were Texans, and her father’s were from Alabama. She cooked mush and biscuits, and once at my request, hominy. In her heart of hearts I suspect she thought of us as city-bred and as Northerners who forgot their ancestors wore Confederate gray. In one of her short stories, she transposes her own two children to the banks of Sulphur Creek, calls them city-bred, and sets them to making mud pies, to see if they'll fit in the scene. She decides they fit, and that they're not fundamentally different than herself and her sisters and their muddy concoctions of earlier years.

Though the Jordans were transplanted Southerners, they drew a sharp distinction between themselves and the enclave of neighbors from North Carolina. They differed at least in education and religion. When someone once confused the difference, I remember my grandmother asserting with warm conviction and a tinge of horror: We were NOT tarheels!

Mabel and Charles were literate, and Charles served on the school board. All of the daughters finished high school and several went on to Bellingham Normal School in Bellingham and became teachers.

Ella graduated from grade school by taking state examinations, and graduated from high school in 1917. When the high school was built in Mossyrock, she passed the teacher examination and then taught all grades at the school in Swofford for the next two years. She was 19, the only teacher for thirteen pupils.

With the First World War, she and her sister Allie went to Washington, D.C. Ella worked in the State Department, decoding overseas telegrams. After the war. she returned to the farm, and in 1923 she set out with her sister Winnie to drive to Yellowstone Park. She spent the summer of 1925 in a herring cannery in Alaska. On February 28, 1926, she married a tall, blond Swedish immigrant, Charles Oscar Dale. They moved first to an apartment in Seattle, and then to a house he had built in West Seattle, where they lived the rest of their lives.

Their first child was a daughter, Barbara, who lives with her husband in Edmonds. Her son Eugene (Bud) lives in the Issaquah area. He and his wife Mary have four children, of whom I am one.

Before Ella died she told the family several times that she wanted me to have her book so I could finish it or do something with it. So I inherited a cardboard box with the second draft, the first draft, a folder full of attenuated notes, some odd magazine clippings, and assorted letters.

As for the book, I haven't finished it at all. It is here, all in her own words. I haven't changed any of her words. Some are older than mine, and are archaic. But my words are just different, not better.

Carolyn Dale, February 1996

Characters: Ella Jordan and Her Family

Ella Pearl Jordan Dale, the Author

1894-1974

Ella P. Jordan Dale began writing this manuscript around 1950 and worked on it until shortly before her death in December 1974. Many of the chapters were written as exercises for writing classes. Ella corresponded frequently with her six sisters about their memories of events and included some of these letters in her notes for the work. She also wrote a number of short stories during this period.

Her formal education ended with graduation from Mossyrock High School, after which she got a third grade teacher's certificate and taught school for two years, 1914-16. In July 1918, she went to work in Washington, D.C., in the War Department, in General Pershing's office. In 1923 she and her sister Winnie drove to Yellowstone National Park, and in 1925 she spent the summer working at a herring cannery in Alaska.

She married in February 1926 to Charles O. Dale, a Swedish immigrant working as a machinist in Seattle. They moved into a house Charles had built in West Seattle, and lived there their entire lives. The house was roomy, with a beautiful view and large yard with fruit trees, nut trees and a sizeable garden plot where they grew vegetables and raspberries every year. Ella died three weeks short of her eightieth birthday (Charles had died about four and a half years before), survived by a daughter, a son, and ten grandchildren.

Mabel Jordan

Charles Jordan

The Family:

Papa: Charles Napolean Bonaparte Jordan

Born: Talladega, Talladega, Ala.; February 14, 1860

Died: Swofford, Lewis County, Wash.; January 5, 1916.

Mamma: Mabel Epperson Jordan

Born: Valley Springs, Llano, Texas; April 19, 1867

Died: Swofford, Lewis County, Wash.; March 23, 1941.

Lovie Louisa Jordan

Born: Valley Spring, Llano, Texas; April 5, 1887

Died: Chehalis, Lewis County, Wash.; August 5, 1926

Married to Charles Thurman Riffe. Six children: Maurice, Agnes, Leslie, Quentin, Dorothy, Beula.

Effie Bonita Jordan

Born: Valley Spring, Llano, Texas; Dec. 7, 1888

Died: Chehalis, Lewis County, Wash.; February 20, 1965.

Married: Jeremiah Belcher. No children.

Allie Eunice Jordan

Born: Swofford, Lewis County, Wash.; April 18, 1891

Died: Oakland, Calif.; May 20, 1994

Married: Frank Harvey Cox. Three children: Calvin, Aileen, Melva.

Ola May Jordan

Born: Swofford, Lewis County, Wash.; May 12, 1893

Died: Lacey, Thurston County, Wash.; Feb. 26, 1990

Married: Walter Len Koher. Five children: Geneva, Clyde, Howard, Lloyd, Theodore.

Ella Pearl Jordan

Born: Swofford, Lewis County, Wash.; December 30, 1894

Died: Seattle, Wash.; December 8, 1974

Married: Charles Oscar Dale. Two children: Barbara, Eugene (Bud).

Winnie Ethel Jordan

Born: Swofford, Lewis County, Wash.; March 31, 1897

Died: Olympia, Thurston County, Wash.; Aug. 24, 1980

Married: Nils Arthur Sandberg. Three children: Norman, Stuart, Winifred.

Emma Theresa Jordan

Born: Swofford, Lewis County, Wash; Nov. 14, 1899

Died: Centralia, Lewis County, Wash.; Dec. 21, 1988

Married: Ted Eldred Landes. One child: Ray Allen.

The Three Girls, stepsisters to Charles Jordan:

Leota (Lee) married Jess Ramey and lived in Bellingham, Wash;

Virgie married William Koher and lived in the Randle area;

Annie May married Clarence Workman and lived in Tacoma, Wash.

Memoirs

Life on the Farm for the Seven Jordan Sisters

Sulphur Creek, as it ran through the Farm.

Prologue

From my hillside view I see The Farm, which lies below. It is in a flat, circular valley with turned-up edges covered with woods. Behind the south edge rises Green Mountain. I catch a flashing glimpse of water falling from the mountain—the upper portion of Sulphur Creek Falls—as it drops over a rock cliff into a blind canyon.

To the northeast, Mt. Rainier thrusts its snow-hooded head above unnumbered mountain ridges in between. These are the Cascades in the State of Washington, and in their foothills is snuggled our farm, a tight little pocket.

But the water cannot cover my mind's view as it was before the water came. In memory I see the log house just below me, standing at the northwest corner of the hundred and sixty acres; the house in which I and three others of our family of seven sisters were born. I see the low split-log bridge spanning lazy Mud Creek, on whose edge we made mud pies and baked them in the sun. It was the creek where we sailed leaf boats with stick passengers, and mourned when they swamped in an eddy, losing all aboard. We rejoiced for the ones that turned the bend and sailed to far-away lands.

I look across the east side of the farm and in memory see the New house on the slope of the up-turned edge. Nearby are the barn, the chicken house and the pigpen. The pigpen was built with the logs from the Old house, and when we girls wished to shock folks, we told them we were born in a pigpen. The buildings were destroyed when the water came.

At the foot of the slope on which they stood flowed Sulphur Creek, having fought its way from the canyon and through the woods, until it reached the cut across the middle of our farm. It lost its life in the Cowlitz near a pot of sulphur from which it drew its name. It now ends at the edge of the woods, where it mingles its waters with that which covers our fields.

As the water cannot cover my mind’s view, neither can it blot out the memories of our lives as we lived them on the farm lying below. And this is the story of that portion lived in the first years of this century and a bit of the century before.

Chapter 1

1890-1899 Buying the Farm; Birth of the Daughters

It was the year of 1890 when Papa and Mamma, (Charles and Mabel Jordan) with their two infant daughters, Lovie and Effie, moved into the log house on their newly purchased farm. They had followed some of Mamma's kinfolk from the plains of Texas, lured by reports of lush, productive soil in the new state. Uncle Jay Harris, who had purchased the adjoining farm, made the three-day round trip in the dead of winter, over primitive roads, with his oxen-drawn covered wagon, to haul them from the train depot in Winlock.

The tall, slender, blue-eyed Irishman with a trimmed mustache and his brown-eyed, five-month pregnant wife, who did not reach to his shoulder, settled down in their new home with the eagerness and vigor of real pioneers. Facing them was the farm mortgage at twenty-four percent interest and the privations of the years ahead. They arose at four o'clock in the morning, and years later laughed at the senselessness of sitting around burning precious coal oil, awaiting daylight so Papa could start enlarging the small cleared spot on the farm.

Until the following spring when a garden could be planted, their diet was mostly potatoes and gravy with cornbread and sugar syrup.

Four months after their arrival, Mrs. Kelly, a neighbor over the hills four miles away, was sent for, and as she afterwards told Allie, she found her in an old hollow stump.

Two years later she came again and found Ola under a big cabbage leaf.

Aunt Alice Magill never informed me where she located me two years after Ola arrived at the log house. But she did say that Papa was so disappointed he did not get a long desired son, he refused at first to look at me. Mamma said I was as gaunt as the Times, for I arrived during the great depression of the Cleveland Administration. It was also about then that their only milk cow tangled in the manger and broke her neck. Mamma did not realize her own milk supply did not satisfy, and I cried constantly.

It was the bottles of Castoria that saved your life, she later told me.

To pacify my crying when she worked in the garden, she tucked me under one arm and hoed with the other. She bruised a finger, which developed into a felon, and in agonizing pain she walked the floor day and night for a week, for the nearest doctor was three days away.

Not to break the two-year rhythm of new life in our home, Mrs. McMurray was sent for, and unable to locate a boy, she helped Mamma present Papa with his sixth daughter, named Winnie. I was transferred from the homemade cedar cradle to the trundle bed to sleep with Allie and Ola. The bed was shoved under a higher bed during the day.

My first fond memory of life in the log house was at night when our parents' work was done, and all was warm and snug. Papa crossed one leg over his knee, and mounting his foot, I went for a galloping ride while he sang.

Bye Baby-bunting; Papa's gone a-hunting, to catch a rabbit skin, to wrap his Baby-bunting in.

Mamma's knitting needles clicked while, with her toe, she rocked Winnie in the cradle.

Uncle Thomas Jordan was Papa's bachelor brother who had joined our parents in the new land and bought a farm on top of Green Mountain. He spent much time at our house, and we children adored him—except when he teased. He tossed me in the air, my head almost hitting the ceiling. It was thrilling to go up but terrifying to come down for fear he wouldn't catch me.

One night, with my shoe still on, I stepped into Papa's rubber boot, which he had just removed with the boot-jack, a block of tree-trunk with two forks. When I tired of parading around the room, I asked Papa to remove the boot. He feigned inability then sent me across the room to Uncle Thomas. He, too, pretended, as he pulled and tugged and groaned, then sent me back to Papa, who carried on the joke. I was frightened.

I want this boot off, I do! And crying, I repeated the plea. The two fun-loving Irishmen decided they had gone far enough with their fun.

By now Lovie, Effie, and Allie were in school. Allie, in her first year, was rebellious. She'd reach a certain distance then say she was too tired to go on. The older girls complained she was making them late to school. They reached the end of their patience the morning she sat down and refused to budge. They formed a seat with crossed hands and Allie, with her arms around their necks, rode to school in her private carriage.

It was the winter night the lady teacher was invited to our home for supper that I learned my first lesson in table manners. I sat in the highchair in the family circle around the oilcloth-covered table. The coal oil lamp in the center flickered and made strange moving shadows on the wall. The wood cookstove warmed the lean-to kitchen. The low slanting roof embraced us. I felt happy and secure.

The bowl of deep-fried shoestring potatoes had made the first round of helpings. It now was on the second round, and of course was passed first to the guest. I noticed with alarm the diminished content as the teacher scooped the golden strings into her plate, and my distress could no longer be contained.

Don't take them all! I cried out. I want some.

The whole family swooped down on my head. In utter humiliation I screwed myself down to the level of the table as the schoolteacher chuckled with mirth.

One bright sunny day, Effie, standing in the front doorway, called out excitedly, Mamma! Mamma! Come quick. There's a big rabbit out here!

Hearing her urgent voice, all ran to look. Leaping across the field, straight toward the house, was a young deer. It topped the rail fence without effort. On it came in wild terror, probably chased by dogs from the woods. It tried to jump the creek, but exhausted, it mired