Berry shook her head. “I don’t know. I expect it will be a surprise. I don’t believe it will be like a real school,” she replied.
Mollie’s smile vanished. To go to a “real school” seemed the finest thing in the world to the little mountain girl, who had not even known31 the letters of the alphabet until Berry had taught them to her, and who could now, at ten years of age, only read words of one syllable, and was just beginning to learn the meaning of figures.
31
Berry was quick to notice the change in Mollie’s expression, and added, “I mean we won’t sit behind little desks, and keep as quiet as mice, the way girls do in schools.”
“P’raps we will,” Mollie rejoined hopefully; “p’raps I’ll learn writin’.”
“Of course you will,” Berry declared, and Mollie’s smile promptly reappeared.
“May I spin this morning?” Berry asked, going toward the big spinning-wheel that stood in one corner of the kitchen, on which Mrs. Bragg spun the yarn for the stockings worn by the family, and often permitted Berry to spin the soft fleecy rolls of wool into yarn. Berry always considered this permission a great privilege, and her father had promised to make a spinning-wheel for her.
Usually Mrs. Bragg was quite ready to let Berry try her hand at the wheel, but this morning she shook her head dolefully.
“The wheel’s give out,” she declared. “Steve32 promised to take a look at it, but land knows when he’ll get ’round to it.”
32
Berry approached the big wheel and looked at it anxiously. “What’s the matter with it?” she asked.
“’Twon’t move!” and to prove this Mrs. Bragg touched the rim of the wheel, that usually responded to the lightest touch, but now kept firm and steady.
Berry had watched her father in his work with tools, had seen him oil hinges that would not move, or loosen nuts that held some wheel or bar too tightly, and she had been taught to do many things that most little girls never learn; so now she examined the wheel with so serious a face that Mrs. Bragg looked at her in amazement.
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