Then the fire was shining on the hearth, the cold and the dark and the wild beasts were all shut out, and Jack the brindle bulldog and Black Susan the cat lay blinking at the flames in the fireplace. Ma sat in her rocking chair, sewing by the light.
I declare, you eat more plums than you pick up,” Mary said. “I don’t either any such a thing,” Laura contradicted. “I pick up every plum I eat.
Ma had been very fashionable, before she married Pa, and a dressmaker had made her clothes.
Politicians, they take pleasure a-prying into a man’s affairs and I aimed to please ’em.
God is America’s king.
The snug log house looked just as it always had. It did not seem to know they were going away.
One day in the woods he met an Indian. They stood in the wet, cold woods and looked at each other, and they could not talk because they did not know each other’s words.
For winter was coming. The days were shorter, and frost crawled up the window panes at night. Soon the snow would come. Then the log house would be almost buried in snowdrifts, and the lake and the stream would freeze.
Mary and Laura clung tight to their rag dolls and did not say anything. The cousins stood around and looked at them. Grandma and all the aunts hugged and kissed them and hugged and kissed them again, saying good-by.
The candle-light was dim, as though the darkness were trying to put it out.
This country goes three thousand miles west, now. It goes ’way out beyond Kansas, and beyond the Great American Desert, over mountains bigger than these mountains, and down to the Pacific Ocean. It’s the biggest country in the world, and it was farmers who took all that country and made it America, son. Don’t you ever forget that.
Popcorn is American. Nobody but the Indians ever had popcorn, till after the Pilgrim Fathers came to America. On.
Nothing anywhere could be better than being at home with the home folks, she was sure.
You can fill a glass full to the brim with milk, and fill another glass of the same size brim full of popcorn, and then you can put all the popcorn kernel by kernel into the milk, and the milk will not run over. You cannot do this with bread. Popcorn and milk are the only two things that will go into the same place.
She had not known before that it takes two to make a smile.
Now she was alone; she must take care of herself. When you must do that, then you do it and you are grown up.
Success gets to be a habit, like anything else a fellow keeps on doing.
In the West the land was level, and there were no trees. The grass grew thick and high. There the wild animals wandered and fed as though they were in a pasture that stretched much farther than a man could see, and there were no settlers. Only Indians lived there.
Pa promised that when they came to the West, Laura should see a papoose.
When a man undertakes a job, he has to stick to it till he finishes it. If.