Instantly the blessing is manifest — the sadness of that day-break drip, drip, drip is healed — the whole character of the day is changed, and the rain-melody becomes not a funeral-march but a dance.

The attic is the place of all places you would most love to be on this particular calendar day!

How stupid to spoil a perfectly good Saturday by sitting on a hard beam, with wet spray blowing in your face all the time, and getting all tired out holding a heavy fish-pole, when here is the attic waiting for you with its mysterious dark corners, its scurrying mice that suddenly develop into lions for your bow-and-arrow hunting, and its maneuvers on the broad field of its floor with yourself as the drum-corps and your companions as the army equipped with wooden swords and paper helmets!

-

The day has been rich in adventure, and exploration, and the doing of great deeds.

And it has been all too short, for the attic is growing dim, and mother is again calling us — telling us to send our little playmates home and come and get our bread and milk.

A last arrow is shot into the farthest comer where some undiscovered jungle beast may be prowling.

A last roll is given to the drum, and the army disbands.

A sudden fear seizes upon us as we realize that night has come and we are in the attic, alone.

And with no need of further urging we scamper unceremoniously down the stairs, slam the attic door, hurry into the kitchen where Maggie has our table waiting . . . .

-

Eight o’clock — and we’re all tucked away among the feathers again!

Aren’t we glad we didn’t go down to the river — it would have been a cold, dismal day — and perhaps they weren’t biting today, anyway — and we should have gotten very wet.

It is still raining, raining hard — pattering unceasingly on the roof . . .  And the tin eave-troughs are singing their gentle lullaby of running water trickling from the shingles . . . a lullaby so soothing that we do not hear mother softly open the door . . . and come to our crib and place the little bare arms under the covers and leave a kiss on the yellow curls and a benediction in the room.

Grandmother

Do you remember the day she lost her glasses?  My, such a commotion!  Everybody turned in to hunt for them.  Grandmother tramped from one end of the house to the other — we all searched — upstairs and down — with no success.

They weren’t in the big Bible (we turned the leaves carefully many times — it was the most likely place).  They weren’t in either of her sewing baskets, nor in the cook-book in the kitchen.  Grandfather said she could use one pair of his gold-bowed ones — but shucks!  She couldn’t see with anything except those old steel-bowed specs! . . .

And then, when she finally sat down and said for the fiftieth time:  “I wonder where those specs are!” . . . and put the corner of her apron to her eyes — I happened to look up, and there they were — on the top of her head!  Been there all the time . . .  And she enjoyed the joke as much as we did — a joke that went around the little town and followed her through all the years within my memory of her.