Part 20 (1/2)

Since we had to leave the house, I am glad it is you who are living in it.

Faithfully yours MARY OWEN

So the children had a happy Thanksgiving, even without the Thanksgiving egg. And still Peggy and Alice looked eagerly for eggs and could not find even one. Autumn had changed to winter, and still the hens were moulting, and there were no eggs. The vegetable garden, at the back of the house, was now turned into a fairy country, for the brown earth was covered with a snowy quilt, and every twig on the trees and shrubs was encased in diamonds. The snow came suddenly--one night, when the children went to bed, the ground had been bare, and in the morning the world seemed all made over new. But still the dwellers in Hotel Hennery showed no signs of laying eggs.

And then one morning, a few days before Christmas, just as the children had given up hope, Peggy found an egg. It was a thrilling moment; and Angel Hen-Farrell was so proud to be the first of the hens to lay an egg that she would not stop talking about it. What she said sounded to Alice like ”Cut-cut-cad-ar-cut, cadarcut, cadarcut,” but Peggy said she was talking a foreign language.

”I can translate it for you, Alice,” she said; ”it is the Rhode Island Red language.”

”What is she saying?”

”She is saying: 'Come and look at my first egg of the season. It is very beautiful. The sh.e.l.l is of the palest brown, like coffee ice-cream. It is very beautiful. Look at it, all ye hens who have laid nothing. It is very beautiful--of palest brown, like coffee ice-cream.'”

Diana had one of her ill turns, just before Christmas; and the poor little girl had to spend Christmas in bed. She was much better when the day came, but her father said she must not get up, but that she could see Peggy and Alice for a little while in the afternoon.

The children had hung their stockings up the night before, and they had been surprised and delighted with their presents. Peggy wanted to take them up to show to Diana.

”But there are such a lot of them,” Alice protested, ”and some of them are so big.”

”We can wear up the furs and stocking-caps and mittens,” said Peggy, ”and we can put the other things in a basket and carry them up on our new sled. She'd love to see her namesake.”

”I'm not going to take Diana out in such slippery walking,” said Alice, ”she might get a fall and break her head.”

”As you please,” said Peggy; ”but I know if I liked a person well enough to name a child after her, I'd take her up the first minute, slippery or not.”

”You might,” said Alice, ”but I'm not going to. She is my child, and she's very breakable.”

”Well, anyway, I am going to take Diana a Christmas egg, breakable or not.”

”It isn't your egg; it's mother's,” Alice reminded her; for Henrietta had not begun to lay.

”I'm sure mother will let me have an egg to give to Diana, won't you, mother?”

”Certainly,” said Mrs. Owen; ”I should never have had any of my Rhode Island friends if it had not been for Peggy.”

”I think I'll write a verse to go with the egg,” said Peggy.

Alice admired the way in which Peggy could write verses. Peggy had only to take a pencil in hand, and a verse seemed to come out on the paper.

”I think the verses live inside the pencil,” Peggy once said. She liked a blue pencil best. It seemed to have more interesting verses living inside it than a black one.

”I'd like to see if I can do it,” Alice said.

”All right,” and Peggy handed the pencil over. ”Don't hold it so tight; hold it loosely, like this.”

But the pencil would write nothing for Alice, no matter how she held it.

And Peggy had only held it a few minutes before she wrote a verse. She sat with her eyes tight shut, for she said she could think better. And presently Peggy and the pencil wrote a Christmas verse. She liked it so well she copied it on a sheet of her best Christmas note-paper. At the head of the sheet was the picture of a window with a lighted candle and a Christmas wreath; and there were a boy and a girl outside, singing Christmas carols. This was the verse that Peggy and the pencil wrote.

”I'd like to send a Christmas carol, To please and cheer my dear Diana: But here's an egg Angel Hen-Farrell Has laid in her best Christmas manner.”

Mrs. Owen packed the egg carefully with cotton wool in a small box. She folded the paper with the verse on it and put that on top. She tied the box up with some Christmas ribbon that had come around one of Peggy's presents. The ribbon had holly leaves with red berries on it. She slipped a tiny Santa Claus card under the ribbon. On the card Peggy wrote, ”Diana, from a friend who lives in Hotel Hennery.”