The Corner House Girls on a Tour

Hill Grace Brooks

The Corner House Girls on a Tour / Where they went, what they saw, and what they found

CHAPTER I – A RED LETTER DAY INDEED

There was a deal of bustle and a twittering like an eager flock of sparrows in the big kitchen of the old Corner House, which stood facing Main Street in Milton, but with its long side and rear yard and garden running far back on Willow Street.

The four Kenway girls had the room all to themselves at this early hour on Saturday morning, for Mrs. MacCall and Aunt Sarah Maltby had not yet come downstairs, while Linda, the maid, had deserted the kitchen and pantry altogether for the time being.

Ruth, the eldest and most sedate of the sisters, was filling sandwiches at the dresser – and such a variety as there was of them!

Chicken, with mayonnaise and a lettuce leaf; pink ham cut thin and decorated with little golden dabs of mustard; peanut butter sandwiches; nut and cheese sandwiches, the filling nestling in a salad leaf, too; tuna fish, with narrow slices of red, red Spanish peppers decorating it; and of course sardines, carefully split and laid between soda crackers. What picnic lunch would be complete without sardines?

Agnes, the next oldest to Ruth and the beauty of the family, was slicing bread as exactly as though it were a problem in geometry and in such quantity that Tess declared it looked as though they were to feed an army.

Tess herself was seriously attending to the boiling of two dozen eggs in a big saucepan.

“Though why you need to watch ’em so closely I can’t see,” complained Agnes. “There are other things you might be doing when there is so much to do – goodness knows! Those eggs won’t get away.”

“No,” joined in Dot, the youngest of the Corner House girls, and quite seriously, too. “No. It isn’t like boiling lobsters.”

“Right, Dottums,” chuckled Agnes, recovering from her vexation immediately. “Eggs are an entirely different kind of shellfish.”

“Well,” said the little girl, explaining, “Mrs. Adams boiled some raw lobsters the other day, and one hopped right out of the pot on to the floor and started for the door – it really did!”

“Oo-ee!” gasped Tess, attracted for a moment from the bobbing eggs by this statement. “The poor thing!”

“Who’s a poor thing – Mrs. Adams?” asked Ruth, laughing gayly.

“Why, no,” said Tess, who was nothing if not tender-hearted. “The lobster.”

“Goodness!” exclaimed Agnes. “Do you s’pose it hurts a lobster to be boiled?”

“Why doesn’t it?” demanded Tess, promptly.

“’Cause it has a shell,” ventured Dot.

“Why – because they always do boil them,” said Agnes, rather at a loss for an answer to Tess’ question.

“Sometimes they broil them,” said the oldest sister, smiling.

“Well, they’re used to it, anyway,” declared Agnes, with conviction.

“I – I don’t believe anybody could get used to being boiled,” observed Tess, slowly. “Look at Sammy Pinkney.”

“Where?” demanded Agnes, jumping. “I hope that horrid child isn’t coming over so early. I hoped we’d get away without having him around.”

“Oh, my!” murmured Dot. “You know he’s just got over the scarlet fever.”

“But he hasn’t got over being a nuisance,” declared the older girl.

“I didn’t mean that Sammy was really here – to look at,” explained the serious Tess. “I meant – I meant – ”

“Well, what did you mean?” asked Agnes, who was inclined to be impatient.

“She meant, ‘consider Sammy,’ didn’t you, Tessie?” suggested Ruth, kindly.

“Why – yes.”

“Oh! Were you taking him for an example?” cried Agnes. “But Sammy hasn’t ever been boiled – although maybe he ought to have been.”

“No; he hasn’t been boiled,” said the serious Tess, still watching the eggs bobbing in the boiling water. “But he’s punished lots of times – at school, I mean. And he doesn’t seem to get used to it. He hollers just as loud now as the first time I ever heard him.”

“Did the lobster holler?” chuckled Agnes. “Did it, Dot?”

But Dot – who was not allowed to “mess in” with the lunch – had found another subject for consideration. She had been looking at Ruth, dexterously opening a second can of sardines. Now, when the cover was laid back and the oil drained off, the smallest girl pointed a dimpled finger at the contents of the can.

“What’s the matter, honey?” asked Ruth, smiling down at the serious face of the fairy-like Dot. “What is it?”

“Why, Ruthie,” said Dot, wonderingly, “I was only thinking if that middle fish wanted to turn over, what a lot of trouble it would have!”

Amid the laughter of the two older girls at this, the door banged open and a boy with a mop of flaxen hair – a regular “whitehead” and a football cut at that – burst into the room.

“My goodness me, girls! aren’t you ready yet?” he demanded. “And it’s half-past seven.”

“The eggs are,” Tess declared, the first to speak, for she had not been laughing.

“Well, then,” said the boy, “you and I, Tess, will just take the eggs and go.”

“What’s the matter, Neale O’Neil? Won’t your horse stand?” drawled Agnes, tossing her head.

“We would have been ready long ago if it had not been for you, Neale,” said Ruth, promptly.

“How’s that? I’ve been up since five. And the car’s right here at the side gate. Cracky! it’s a scrumptious auto, girls. I don’t believe there ever was a finer.”

“When our Mr. Howbridge does anything, he always does it right,” proclaimed Tess, giving up the guardianship of the eggs to Ruth. “And Mr. Howbridge had the car built for us.”

“But we wouldn’t ever have had it,” put in Dot, eager to tell all she knew, “if Mrs. Eland and Miss Pepperill hadn’t given us the money ’cause we found their Uncle Lemon Aden’s money.”

“Oh, goodness!” gasped Tess. “Lem-u-el, Dot!”

But Dot ignored the correction. “It was awfully nice of them to give us the car because we found the fortune in our garret.”

“Lots you did towards finding it,” chuckled Neale O’Neil.

“I’d like to know why I didn’t help find it!” cried the smallest Corner House girl, indignantly. “I saw it first – so there! I opened the book it was hid in and I thought it was pitchers.”

“Say! that isn’t getting us anywhere,” began the boy again. “Can’t you hurry? Just think! the first ride in your car!”

“Don’t remind me,” gasped Agnes, cutting a crooked slice. “My nerves are all jumping now like – like a delightful toothache!”

“Glory! listen to her,” laughed Neale. “But say, Miss Ruthiford Ten-ways, why do you say that it is my fault that you are not all ready?”

“Because we have to put up lunch enough to satisfy your appetite,” said Ruth, running cold water on the eggs from the open faucet.

“Well! I like that!” said Neale.

“I fancy you will, sonny,” said Agnes, looking at him slyly. “There are lots of goodies in it.”

“Now run and get your hats and wraps, children,” commanded Ruth seizing the last two slices of bread Agnes had cut. “That will do, Aggie. Leave a little bread for the folks to eat to-day while we’re gone. That basket is all packed, Neale, and you may take it out and put it in the tonneau.”

“Oh, my!” gasped Agnes, clasping her hands. “Doesn’t that sound fine?”

“What sounds fine!” asked her boy chum, surreptitiously putting the last crumb of a broken sandwich he had found into his mouth.

“The way Ruth said ‘tonneau.’ So – so Frenchy and automobily!”

“Why, Aggie!” gasped Tess, in amazement, before following Dot out of the kitchen, “you’re making up words just like Dot does.”

“I feel like making up words,” laughed Agnes, who had been “crazy for a car” for months and months! “We’ll all be talking about ‘tonneaus,’ and ‘carbureters,’ and ‘gas,’ and ‘wiring,’ and ‘differentials,’ and – ”

“And ‘equilaterals,’ and ‘isosceles triangles,’ and all that,” scoffed Neale. “You’ll know a hot lot about an automobile, Agamemnon.”

“Come, young man!” exclaimed Ruth, tartly, for she was very exact with boys, feeling sure that she did not approve of them – much, “suppose you take the basket out to the car – and these wraps – and this coffee – and the little nursery icebox with the milk bottles – and – ”

“Hold on! Hold on!” yelled Neale O’Neil. “What do you think I have – as many arms as a spider? I can’t do it all in one trip.”

“Well, you might make a beginning,” suggested Ruth. “Come, Aggie. Don’t moon there all day.”

“I’m not,” said her next youngest sister. “I’m thinking.”

“What’s the difference?” demanded Neale, filling his arms with several of the things indicated by Ruth and making for the door.

“I was thinking,” said Agnes, quite seriously for her, “what a difference this is from what we were before we came to Milton and the old Corner House to live.”

Neale had gone out. Ruth looked at her with softer eyes. Ruth was not exactly pretty, but she had a very sweet face. Everybody said so. Now she looked her understanding at Agnes.

“I know, dear – I know,” she said, in her low, full, sweet voice. “This is like another world.”

“Or a dream,” said Agnes. “Do – do you suppose we’ll ever wake up, Ruthie, and find out it’s all been make-believe?”

Ruth laughed outright at that and went over and kissed her. “Don’t let your imagination run away with you,” the older sister said. “It is all real – very real indeed. What could be more real than an automobile – and of our very own?”

Dot came dancing into the room hugging a doll in her arms and cheerfully humming a school song.

“There!” exclaimed Agnes, coming out of the clouds, “I suppose that disreputable Alice-doll has got to go along. It does look awful.”

Dot stopped her song at once and her lips pouted.

“She isn’t dis – disreput’ble – she isn’t!” she cried, stormily. “She’s only sick. How would you like it, Aggie Kenway, if you’d been buried alive —and with dried apples – and had had your complexion spoiled?”

Dot was usually the most peaceful of mortals; but Agnes had touched a sore spot.

“Never mind; you shall take her, love,” Ruth said.

“I suppose if we want to go off on a real tour by and by – this coming vacation – Dot’ll have to lug that Alice-doll,” grumbled Agnes. “Suppose we meet nice people at some of the hotels we stop at, and other little girls have dolls? Dot’s will look as though she came from Meadow Street.” Meadow Street was in a poor section of Milton.

“I don’t care,” grumbled Dot; “she’s going.”

“She ought to go a hospital first,” declared Agnes.

“Who ought to go to a hospital?” demanded Neale, coming in again.

“My Alice-doll, Neale,” cried Dot, running to him, sure of sympathy – of a kind, at least.

“Well,” said the boy, “why not? If folks go to hospitals and get cured, why not dolls?”

“Oh, Neale O’Neil!” gasped Dot, hugging her cherished doll closer.

“Just think how nice Mrs. Eland was to folks in her hospital,” went on Neale, his eyes twinkling. “And Doctor Forsyth. A hospital is a mighty fine place.”

“But – but what would they do to my Alice-doll?” asked the smallest girl, seriously.

“Suppose they should give her a new complexion? Make her quite well again? Wouldn’t that be worth while?”

Dot held the really dreadful looking doll away from her and gazed with loving eyes upon the wreck of her former pink and white beauty.

“She is just as – as dear to me as ever she was,” she sighed. “But I s’pose her complexion is muddy – and her nose is flattened a little – and her lips aren’t red any more-and her eyes are washed out. But – but are you sure they won’t hurt her?”

“We’ll have to find a hospital where they agree not to hurt,” said Neale seriously.

“Now you’ve got yourself in a mess, Neale O ‘Neil,” whispered Agnes. “She’ll never let you rest.”

But the boy only grinned at her. Tess came back. Ruth brought the hats of Agnes and herself and their outer wraps. Everything that they could possibly need for the day’s outing was gathered together and taken out to the big, shiny, seven-passenger touring car that stood gloriously in the morning sunshine before the Willow Street door of the old Corner House.

Tom Jonah, the old Newfoundland dog, and the guardian of the premises, evidently desired to accompany the merry party; but Ruth vetoed that, although he might have ridden in the front seat with Neale.

“And I’m going to ride there myself,” declared Agnes, firmly. “I’ve got to learn to run this car right away. If Neale could learn, and get a license, I can. By the way, Neale, where is your license?”

“Oh, I’ve got it with me,” returned the boy. “D’ you want me to have it pasted on the back of my coat?”

“Tom Jonah must stay at home – and the kittens, too,” said Tess, looking at the troop of cats and kittens lingering about the side porch, waiting for their morning meal.

“And Billy Bumps,” added Dot, referring to the solemn old goat grazing on the drying green.

Uncle Rufus, the black factotum of the Corner House, came up from the garden, grinning widely at them.

“Don’ yo’ chillun run down nothin’ – nor run up nothin’ – w’ile yo’ is gone. I dunno ‘bout dat contraption. Ah hopes yo’ git back widout more’n a dozen laigs broke.”

“Goodness, Uncle Rufus!” cried Agnes. “What do you think we are – centipedes?”

“Dunno nottin’ ‘bout dem ’er,” declared the old colored man, chuckling. “Don’t hab center-pigs in Virginny, whar I done come from. Dey uses razorbacks fo’ de mos’ part in makin’ po’k.”

The car started amid a gale of laughter at this. Mrs. MacCall waved her cap from an open second story window. Some of the neighbors took a deep interest in their departure, too. It was certainly a fact that the Corner House girls had suddenly become of much importance since it was known that they had a car.

Ruth and the others looked up at Aunt Sarah Maltby’s windows at the front of the house as the car jounced delightfully across the tracks on Main Street. But the old lady kept her curtains drawn. She would not even look out at them.

They sped along so easily, the strong springs and shock-absorbers taking the jar at the crossings, that even Ruth sighed ecstatically. Agnes murmured:

“This is life. Oh, Neale! it’s the most delightful way to travel.”

“Is it better than riding horses in a circus, Neale?” demanded Tess, from the tonneau.

Neale laughed. He had been circus born and bred, and the little girls still believed that such a life must be one round of pleasure and excitement. They never could understand why Neale had run away from Twomley & Sorber’s Herculean Circus and Menagerie.

Suddenly Agnes, the volatile, thought of another thing. “Oh, me! Oh, my!” she cried. “What ever should we do?”

“Goodness! what’s the matter with you now?” demanded her older sister.

“Suppose our auto should be stolen like Mr. Collinger’s!”

“Don’t say that, Aggie!” wailed Tess.

“They couldn’t steal our auto,” declared Dot, with emphasis.

“Why not?” asked Neale, curiously.

“’Cause Tom Jonah wouldn’t let ’em,” said the smallest girl.

“Then we should have brought Tom Jonah with us,” Agnes said. “We’ll have to let him watch the car all the time.”

“Mr. Collinger’s car was taken right away from the front of the County Court House. Those thieves were bold,” said Ruth. “I heard Mr. Howbridge say that there was something behind that affair. He doubts if the car was stolen by any common thieves.”

“Common or uncommon,” cried Agnes, “we don’t want ours stolen!”

“Better set a watch at the garage door at night,” chuckled Neale.

They were out in the country now and had entered a smooth, but “woodsy,” road that passed through a rather thick forest. The road was very narrow in places and there were only a few houses along the track for some miles.

Suddenly they sighted just ahead a basket phaeton and a brown, fat pony hitched to it. Neale slowed down quickly, for the turnout was standing still. The driver was a middle-aged woman with a good many fussy looking ribbons in her bonnet and otherwise dressed quite gaily. The fat brown pony was standing still, flicking flies with his tail and wagging his ears comfortably. He was in the very middle of the road and by no possibility could the car be steered around the turnout.

The woman looked around at the car and its passengers and her face displayed a most exasperated expression.

“I don’t know what you’ll do!” she cried, in a rather shrill voice. “I can’t make him budge. He’s been standing here this way for fifteen minutes, and sometimes he balks for hours!”

CHAPTER II – WHAT MRS. HEARD HEARD

“Can’t you back, Neale?” asked Ruth Kenway, doubtfully. “We really don’t want to stay here all day.”

“Or wait upon the pleasure of a ridiculous beast like that,” snapped Agnes, more than a little exasperated herself.

The woman looked around again. She had a pleasant face, and Tess smiled at her. Tess knew that the lady must feel a good deal worse than they did about it.

“You don’t know how ridiculous he is,” said the woman, hopelessly. “He may start any minute; then again he may stay here until he gets hungry. And he’s only just eaten his breakfast.”

“He looks as if he’d live as long without eating as a camel can go without drinking,” chuckled Neale O’Neil.

“It’s no laughing matter,” protested Agnes. “We want to get somewhere.”

“You can’t want to get somewhere worse than I do, my dear,” said the woman, with a sigh. “And only think! I have sat behind this pony hours and hours during the past ten years.”

“Can’t – can’t he be cured?” asked Tess, doubtfully.

“He’s a real pretty pony, I think,” said Dot.

“‘Handsome is as handsome does,’ Mrs. Mac would say,” Ruth declared. “Is there no way of turning, Neale?” she repeated.

“I don’t see how. We don’t want to scratch the car all up in those bushes and on those stumps. And if we back to where the road is wider we’ll have to back for half a mile.”

“A trolley car is lots better than an auto, then,” declared Dot, with conviction.

“Why, Dottie! how can you say that?” cried Tess, in utter disapproval.

“’Cause if it gets stuck the motorman can go to the back end and run it just as well as at the front end,” said the smallest Corner House girl, promptly.

“Some kid that!” murmured Neale, while the others laughed. “Have you tried the whip, ma’am?” he asked of the woman in the basket phaeton.

“I’ve broken it on him,” confessed the woman, shaking her head. “He doesn’t even feel it. The flies bother him more than a whip. He is just the most tantalizing brute of a horse that ever was. Jonas! Get up!”

Jonas stood still. He merely flicked flies and wagged his ears. He was really the most peaceful animate object visible in the whole landscape.

The Corner House girls, since coming to Milton to live in the old dwelling that Uncle Peter Stower had left them at his death, had enjoyed many adventures, but few more ridiculous than this. Here they sat in their new, high-powered car, ready and anxious to spin over the country roads to their goal – a famous picnicking grounds fifty miles from Milton – and a little old fat brown pony, with a stubborn disposition and a cropped mane, held them up as certainly as though he had been a highway robber!

The four young Kenways – Ruth, Agnes, Tess and Dot – with Aunt Sarah Maltby (who really was only an “adopted” aunt) had been very poor indeed before Uncle Peter Stower had died and left the girls the bulk of his estate and a small legacy to Aunt Sarah.

Mr. Howbridge, the administrator of the estate and the girls’ guardian, had come to the Kenways’ poor tenement in the city where they lived, and had taken them to the old Corner House – quite an old mansion overlooking the Parade Ground in Milton, and supposed by some of the neighbors to be “haunted.”

How the girls laid the “garret ghost” and how they proved their right and title to Uncle Peter’s estate against the claims of a certain Mrs. Treble (known as “Mrs. Trouble” to the rather pert Agnes) and her little girl, “Double-Trouble,” is told in the first volume of this series, entitled “The Corner House Girls.”

Afterward the little “Adamless Eden” on the corner of Willow and Main Streets is trespassed upon by a boy who has run away from a circus to get an education – Neale O’Neil. He proves to be a thoroughly likable boy, and even Ruth and Tess, who do not much approve of the opposite sex, are prone to like Neale.

In “The Corner House Girls at School” Neale becomes a fixture in the neighborhood, living with Mr. Con Murphy, the little old cobbler on the street back of the Stower place, and doing chores for the Corner House girls and other neighbors to help support himself while he attends school.

The girls extend their acquaintance widely during this first school year at Milton, and when summer comes they visit Pleasant Cove, where they befriend Rosa and June Wildwood, two Southern girls, and meanwhile have adventures galore along the shore. Indeed, “The Corner House Girls Under Canvas” introduces many new friends to both the girls themselves and to the reader, notable among whom is Tom Jonah, who, although only a dog, is a thorough gentleman.

The girls’ friendliness to all living creatures gathers about them, as is natural, a galaxy of pets, including a rapidly growing menagerie of cats, the dog in question, a goat, and (this is Agnes’ inclusion) Sammy Pinkney, the little boy who is determined to be a pirate when he grows up.

The fall following this summer vacation just mentioned, sees all the Corner House girls taking part in a play produced by the combined effort of the town schools. Their failures and successes in producing The Carnation Countess is interwoven with a mystery surrounding the punishment of Agnes and some of her fellow-classmates for an infraction of the rules – a punishment that promises at one time to spoil the play entirely. “The Corner House Girls in a Play” is interesting and it turns out happily in the end. One of the best things about it is the fact that three thousand dollars is raised by means of the play for the Women’s and Children’s Hospital, and Mrs. Eland, the matron, is able to retain her position in that institution.

Mrs. Eland and her sister, Miss Pepperill, who has been Tess Kenway’s school teacher, become very good friends of the Corner House girls. In the volume of the series immediately preceding this present narrative, entitled “The Corner House Girls’ Odd Find” the Kenways find an old, apparently worthless, album in the garret of the mansion – a treasure room which seems inexhaustible in its supply of mystery and amusing incidents.

This album seems to contain a lot of counterfeit money and bonds, which in the end prove to have been hidden in the Stower house by a miserly uncle of Mrs. Eland and Miss Pepperill, Mr. Lemuel Aden, who had died too suddenly to make a will or to tell of his hidden treasure – and the money and bonds are really perfectly good.

The four Kenway sisters, therefore, saw their friends, the hospital matron and the school teacher, made comfortably wealthy for life; and the beautiful, seven passenger touring car, with self-starter, “quick top,” and all the modern appurtenances of a good automobile, was the gift of the legatees of Mr. Lemuel Aden.

“But it might as well be a flivver,” said Agnes, in disgust, “if we’ve got to sit here all day and watch a fat brown pony whisk his tail.”

“I don’t see what I can do, my dear,” said the woman in the basket phaeton. “You can’t lead him, and you can’t push him, and I verily believe if you built a fire under him he’d just move up far enough to burn the cart, and stand there until his harness scorched him.”

Agnes giggled at that, and was her own jolly self again. “It’s up to you, Neale O’Neil,” she declared. “You’re the chauffeur and are supposed to make us go. Make us!”

“Get out and walk around the pony,” proposed Neale, grinning.

“And what about the car?”

“Do you think we could lift it over?” said Ruth, with scorn.

“Now, young man,” Agnes pursued, with gravity. “It is your duty to get us to Marchenell Grove. We’re still twenty-five or thirty miles away from it – ”

“My goodness!” exclaimed the lady in front. “Were you young folks going there?”