“Let’s sit in a circle on the floor,” Adele said as she threw fresh wood on the fire. “It’s heaps cosier, and Bettykins, turn the light low, for the blaze is bright enough.”
“Matilda, you sit in the middle,” Doris Drexel suggested, “because you are to be the story-teller to-night. That is if you will be,” she added, smiling at the new pupil. “You see, we are very eager to hear about your Dakota home.”
For a moment a soft, dreamy expression appeared in the eyes that held such a fascination for Adele. “I love my prairie home,” Matilda said almost wistfully, “but I did want to leave it, for it was my mother’s wish that I should come East and have a good education.”
“What is a prairie like?” Peggy asked as Matilda paused.
“Oh, it’s wonderful,” the strange girl replied, turning toward the speaker eyes that fairly glowed. “There’s a wide stretch as far as you can see of waving wheat and corn, golden in the sunlight, with here and there clumps of bright-colored flowers. Blackbirds, with shining, purple-black coats, spring up in a flock when you walk in the corn, and, too, there are meadow-larks and orioles, but that is only in the summer. In the winter there are blizzards that drive fiercely across the plain and the snow piles so high that often I do not leave the house for weeks, except now and then to go to the sod buildings where the chickens and cattle are kept. As soon as they can, the boys dig tunnel-like paths to each outhouse and then they shovel the snow away from the windows so that I can have daylight for my work. It was during those snowed-in weeks that I did most of my studying. I had a queer library of my own, perhaps you will think. It contained very few books, and they were the Bible, ‘Ivanhoe,’ ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ ‘Cranford,’ ‘Little Women,’ ‘Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,’ ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,’ and the almanac, besides the text-books that were used in the country school. I read them over and over on my long shut-in days and evenings, and then sometimes when the boys were away, I would curl up by the fire and listen to the wind that shook the house and wonder if there would ever be anything different. Then, last winter we had a very exciting adventure in a blizzard, and it brought me great good fortune.”