Page:Pacific Monthly volumes 9 and 10.djvu/32



NCLE MAX has no living relative but me. We live in Seattle away up on the brow of Queen Anne Hill. Uncle Max's big sandstone house has velvety terraces dropping away from it, and a wonderful hedge of roses about it all. From the wide windows and galleries we can see just below us a great stretch of Puget Sound, and over to the right a long chain of white robed mountains.

Uncle Max loves this inland sea. It soothes him, he says.

But what I love best in the great panorama around and below us is not this huge busy sea, nor yet those silent, mystery-wrapped mountains, but a tiny little black cottage, with a rickety picket fence, and a moss grown roof, and the front all covered with ivy, green the year round ; and a bit of garden just behind, and all the place aflame just now with yellow daffodils and pale jonquils, and hundreds and hundreds of white and yellow primroses. Haven't I said a thousand times I'd give all "my expectations" from Uncle Max just to own that little spot of black and yellow and to be the girl that lives there? It's Adele and her home.

Some years ago. not many, I was a pupil in the nearest public school. I was almost four feet high, and very white and had large brown freckles and two thick braids of red hair. The boys? called me 'Reddy," then, or "Miss Speckleface." My dresses were very short, just to my knees when they should have been below; but Uncle Max knew no better, and the modiste who dressed me said I looked very cute and stylish that way; so I stood very straight and walked quite proudly, for all the other children said I would have a fortune some day. Sometimes when I just couldn't bear to hear the boys shout, "Hey, there, Reddy, town's afire," any longer, I snapped my short skirts and ran fast to keep from crying.

One day Miss Perry put a new girl in the seat ahead of me. I looked at the back of her. She had a great mop of jet black hair that was not braided at all, but just flared out in a heap all around her head. Her shoulders drooped and she wore a faded cotton dress. I looked under my desk at her feet. She had on buttoned shoes, which were quite out of style, and she had her feet drawn back far under her desk and crossed, as if she was afraid.

I was so angry to have such a looking girl sit there in front of me that I forgot everything else. I jumped right up in school with the tears running down my face, and screamed, "Miss Perry! Miss Perry! I won't sit here. I won't. I won't."

I stamped my foot in a rage and cried loud and hard. And I was angrier than ever when all the other pupils looked right at me, and this new girl turned around with a kind of wonder in her big brown eyes that I glared at through my tears, just as if she couldn't understand; and Miss Perry