The sweetness of life lies in usefulness, like honey deep in the heart of a clover bloom.
Father always maintained that a man would do more work in twelve hours, if he had a rest and all the egg-nog he could drink, morning and afternoon.
The creek would go down. It would be a gentle, pleasant place to play in again. But nobody could make it do that. Nobody could make it do anything. Laura knew now that there were things stronger than anybody. But the creek had not got her. It had not made her scream and it could not make her cry.
Mary was too scared to move. Laura was too scared to stand still.
Oh, Charles!” Ma said. “What will we do?” Pa slumped down on a bench and said, “I don’t know.
They heard the voices howling and shrieking in the wind, and the house creaking, and the snow swishing. “This will never do!” said Ma. “Let’s play bean-porridge hot! Mary, you and Laura play it together, and, Carrie, you hold up your hands. We’ll do it faster than Mary and Laura can!” So they all played bean-porridge hot, faster and faster until they could not say the rhymes, for laughing.
Mary was bigger than Laura, and she had a rag doll named Nettie. Laura had only a corncob wrapped in a handkerchief, but it was a good doll. It was named Susan. It wasn’t Susan’s fault that she was only a corncob. Sometimes Mary let Laura hold Nettie, but she did it only when Susan couldn’t see.
But why couldn’t the little cat –.
He was blowing up the bladder.
Ma wrote them down with her little red pen that had a mother-of-pearl handle shaped like a feather. When her neat, clear writing filled the paper she turned it and filled it again crosswise. On the other side of the paper she did the same thing so that every inch of paper held all the words that it possibly could.
You don’t want to hear about the time I was a naughty little boy.
For dinner they ate the stewed pumpkin with their bread. They made it into pretty shapes on their plates. It was a beautiful color, and smoothed and molded so prettily with their knives. Ma never allowed them to play with their food at table; they must always eat nicely everything that was set before them, leaving nothing on their plates. But she did let them make the rich, brown, stewed pumpkin into pretty shapes before they ate it.
They didn’t say anything. Perhaps Mary felt sweet and good inside, but Laura didn’t. When she looked at Mary she wanted to slap her. So she dared not look at Mary again.
In the bitter cold weather Pa could not be sure of finding any wild game to shoot for meat. The.
The barrels of salted fish were in the pantry, and yellow cheeses were stacked on the pantry shelves. Then.
Haste makes waste, but a lazy man’d rather get his work done fast than do it himself... all it saves is time, son. And what good is time, with nothing to do? You want to sit and twiddle your thumbs, all these stormy winter days?
There was only the enormous, empty prairie, with grasses blowing in waves of light and shadow across it, and the great blue sky above it, and birds flying up from it and singing with joy because the sun was rising. And on the whole enormous prairie there was no sign that any other human being had ever been there.
He called back, softly, “Come out here, Caroline, and look at the moon.
She liked the enormous sky and the winds, and the land that you couldn’t see to the end of. Everything was so free and big and splendid.
We crossed the James River and in 20 minutes we reached the top of the bluffs on the other side. We all stopped and looked back at the scene and I wished for an artist’s hand or a poet’s brain or for even to be able to tell in good plain prose how beautiful it was. If I had been the Indians I wold have scalped more white folks before I ever would have left it.
It beats me,” he said, “why they call a south wind a norther, and how a wind from the south can be so tarnation cold. I never saw anything like it. Down here in this country, the north end of a south wind is the coldest wind I ever heard of.