Page:The Sick-A-Bed Lady.djvu/109



T was not you, yourself, who invented your Happy-day. It was your Father, long ago in little-lad time, when a Happy-Day or a Wooden Soldier or High Heaven itself lay equally tame and giftable in the cuddling, curving hollow of a Father's hand.

Your Father must have been a very great Genius. How else could he have invented any happy thing in the black-oak library?

The black-oak library was a cross-looking room, dingy, lowering, and altogether boggy. You could not stamp your boot across the threshold without joggling the heart-beats out of the gaunt old clock that loomed in the darkermost corner of the alcove. You could not tiptoe to the candy box without plunging headlong into a stratum of creakiness that puckered your spine as though an electric devil were pulling the very last basting thread out of your little soul. Oh, it must have been a very, very aged room. The darkness was abhorrent to