Mother Carey's Chickens

she and her brood had been breasting stormy waters with no harbor in sight. There were friends in plenty here and there, but no kith and kin, a

paths,-that, she conceived, was her chief task in life, and no easy one. "Happy I must contrive that they shall be," she thought, "for unhappiness and discontent are among the foxes that spoil the vines. Stupid they shall not be, while I can think of any force to stir their brains; they have ordinary intelligence, all of them, and they shall learn to use it; dull and sleepy children I can't abide. Fairly good they will be, if they are busy and happy, and cle

d stagger many a person, but it only kindled

Wall, and reaches at last Peacepool? Peacepool, where the good whales lie, waitin

arest whale and asks t

g white peak like an iceberg. "That's Mother Carey," spouts the whale, "as you will f

he do that?

not mine!" the whal

arble throne. And from the foot of the throne, you remember, there swam away, out and out into the sea, millions of new-born

titching, cobbling, basting, filing, planing, hammering, turning, polishing, moulding, measuring, chiselling, clipping, and so forth, as men do when they go to work to make anything. But instead of tha

night long she walked in fields of buttercups and daisies, and saw the June breeze blow the tall grasses. She entered the yellow painted house and put the children to bed in the different rooms, and the i

mise. In the back were all sorts of good things to eat growing in profusion, but modestly out of sight; and in front, where passers-by

; for this woman's heart and hope had somehow flown from the brick house in Charlestown and had bu

en, and thus far seemed to have no notion of life as a difficult enterprise. No mother who respects her boy, or respects herself, can ask him flatly, "Do you intend to grow up with the idea of taking care of me; of having an

de and sense of importance, and gradually to mingle with them certain duties of headship neither so simple nor so agreeable. Beulah would be a delightful beginning. Nancy the Pathfinder would have packed a bag and gone to Beulah on an hour's notice; found the real-estate dealer, in case there was such a metropolitan article in the village; loo

, was equal to watching Columbus depart for an unknown land. Thrilling is the only word that will properly describe it, and the group that followed his departure fr

e owner refuses to rent the house to you, just show him the rest of the fa

had Gilbert, and one could not truly say it was surface gallantry either; it simply did not, at present, go very deep. "No one could call him anything but a fine boy," thought the mother, "and