“I’ve often thought, Tiny,” said Johnny, long afterward, when Katy had made and saved enough to buy a second-hand counter, have shelves put in the front room of the two which she and the old woman occupied, and start a small but promising business. “I’ve often thought of how it would have been if I _had_ cut and run. And it seems to me that the ‘way of escape’—about temptations, you know—is right straight ahead!”
He had remarked, early in the spring, that when he was really rich, when he had five or six millions of dollars, he was going to build a city in the form of a very large circle, only two streets deep, and inside of this circle was to be an immense farm.
“I shall begin,” he said, “by finding and buying a ready-made farm, for the farmhouse and barns and orchard and garden must all be old. I shall put all this in perfect order, without making it look new. Then I shall build twenty-five Swiss cottages, each with three rooms and a great deal of veranda. I shall buy twenty-five excellent tents, and hide them about in the orchard and shrubberies, and I shall invite my friends, fifty families at a time, to come and stay a month with me on my farm; and if my friends should all be used up before the summer is over, I will ask some of them to nominate some of their friends. And in the meantime,” he added, dropping his millionaire tone of voice suddenly, “if we can find the farm and the farmhouse, we will make a beginning by going there for the summer, and planning the rest out.”
The others laughed at this dreadful coming down, but after that it became a favorite amusement to make additions to the “circular city,” and I could not begin to tell you all the plans which were made for the comfort and happiness and goodness of the “circular citizens,” as one thought of one thing, and one of another. And the best of this popular “pretend” was, that it set everybody thinking, and it was surprising to find how many of the plans for the dream-city might, in much smaller ways, of course, be carried out without waiting for all the rest.
For instance, when Tiny said that all the little girls should have dolls, her mother reminded her that she knew how to make very nicely those rag dolls which one makes by rolling up white muslin—a thick roll for the body, and a thin one for the arms; coarse thread sewed round where the neck ought to be, the top of the head “gathered” and covered with a little cap, eyes and nose and mouth inked, or worked in colored thread, upon the face, and the fact that the infant has only one leg concealed by a nice long petticoat and frock.