noise, bad air, and
wicked people. Nothing had hurt Shelley. She had grown so much that
you could see she was larger. Her hair and face--all of Shelley just
shone. Her eyes danced, she talked and laughed all the time, and she
hugged every one who passed her. She never loved us so before. Leon
said she must have been homesick and coming back had given her a spell.
I did hope it would be a bad one, and last forever. I would have liked
for all our family to have had a spell if it would have made them act
and look like Shelley. The Princess was not a speck lovelier, and she
didn't act any nicer.

If I could have painted, I'd have made a picture of Shelley with a
circle of light above her head like the one of the boy Jesus where He
talked with the wise men in the temple. I asked father if he noticed
how much prettier and nicer she was, and he said he did. Then I asked
him if he thought now, that a city was such a bad place to live in, and
he said where she was had nothing to do with it, the same thing would
happen here, or anywhere, when life's greatest experience came to a
girl. That was all he would say, but figuring it out was easy. The
greatest experience that happened to our girls was when they married,
like Sally, so it meant that Shelley had gone and fallen in love with
that lawyer man, and she liked sitting on the sofa with him, and no
doubt she fixed his ties. But if any one thought I would tell anything
I saw when he came they were badly mistaken.

All of us rushed around like we were crazy. If father and mother
hadn't held steady and kept us down, we might have raised the roof. We
were all so glad about getting Leon and the money back; mother hadn't
been sick since the fish cured her; the new blue goose was so like the
one that had burst, even father never noticed any difference; all the
children were either home or coming, and after we had our gifts and the
biggest dinner we ever had, Christmas night all of us would go to the
schoolhouse to see our school try to spell down three others to whom
they had sent saucy invitations to come and be beaten.

Mother sat in the dining-room beside the kitchen door, so that she
could watch the baking, brewing, pickling, and spicing. It took four
men to handle the backlog, which I noticed father pronounced every year
"just a little the finest we ever had," and Laddie strung the house
with bittersweet, evergreens, and the most beautiful sprays of myrtle
that