Bound to Rise
"Sit up to the table, children, breakfast's ready." The speaker was a woman of middle age, not good-looking in the ordinary acceptation of the term, but nevertheless she looked good. She was dressed with extreme plainness, in a cheap calico; but though cheap, the dress was neat. The children she addressed were six in number, varying in age from twelve to four. The oldest, Harry, the hero of the present story, was a broad-shouldered, sturdy boy, with a frank, open face, resolute, though good-natured. "Father isn't here," said Fanny, the second child. "He'll be in directly. He went to the store, and he may stop as he comes back to milk." The table was set in the center of the room, covered with a coarse tablecloth. The breakfast provided was hardly of a kind to tempt an epicure. There was a loaf of bread cut into slices, and a dish of boiled potatoes. There was no butter and no meat, for the family were very poor.
"'Deef' and dumb," quibbled Dozia. "Thank you for the party, Jane. I
had a lov-el-ly time."
"Don't mention it," whispered Jane, as the line of students
swallowed the two adventurers.
But the day was "fraught with questions," as Judith Stearns put it,
deploring her own inability to obtain any "intelligent account of
the whole performance." It became known early that the two juniors
who had been searched for during the night, were not others than
Jane and Dozia, but even a veritable grilling at the hands of a
picked corps of sophs brought nothing more definite from the
wayfarers than "they were over visiting Lenox and the 'fire' was a
false alarm."
"And of course we couldn't put our heads out, for fear of panic,"
grumbled Nettie Brocton.
The day passed somehow, and it was conspicuous by an entire absence
of freshmen from the usual intermingling between periods. Even to
Jane the reason for this was not clear until, in a burst of
confidence with Judith, she outlined her plan of staying over at
Lenox "until the ghost business was disposed of."
"Oh, I know," she explained while Judith pondered. "Miss Gifford is
"Sit up to the table, children, breakfast's ready." The speaker was a woman of middle age, not good-looking in the ordinary acceptation of the term, but nevertheless she looked good. She was dressed with extreme plainness, in a cheap calico; but though cheap, the dress was neat. The children she addressed were six in number, varying in age from twelve to four. The oldest, Harry, the hero of the present story, was a broad-shouldered, sturdy boy, with a frank, open face, resolute, though good-natured. "Father isn't here," said Fanny, the second child. "He'll be in directly. He went to the store, and he may stop as he comes back to milk." The table was set in the center of the room, covered with a coarse tablecloth. The breakfast provided was hardly of a kind to tempt an epicure. There was a loaf of bread cut into slices, and a dish of boiled potatoes. There was no butter and no meat, for the family were very poor.