Ethel Morton's holidays

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I Preparations 9

II The Witches’ Cave and the Fairies’

CHAPTER I HE big brown automobile gave three honks as

A it swung around the corner from Church Street. Roger Morton, raking leaves in the yard beside his house, threw down his rake and vaulted over the gate.

“Good afternoon, sir,” he called to his grandfather, saluting, soldier fashion.

“Good afternoon, son. I stopped to tell you that those pumpkins are ready for you. If you’ll hop in now we can go out and get them and I’ll bring you back again.”

“Good enough!” exclaimed Roger. “HI tell Mother I’m going. She may have some message for Grandmother,” and he vaulted back over the gate and dashed up the steps.

In a minute he was out again and climbing into the car.

“Where are the girls this afternoon?” inquired Mr. Emerson, as he threw in the clutch and started toward the outskirts of Rosemont where he had land enough to allow him to do a little farming.

“Helen and Ethel Brown have gone to the West Woods,” replied Roger, accounting for his sisters.

‘‘Somebody told them that there was a wild grapevine there that still had yellow leaves bright enough for them to use for decorating to-morrow evening.”

“I should be afraid last night’s frost would have shriveled them. What are Ethel Blue and Dorothy up to?” asked Mr. Emerson.

Ethel Blue was Roger’s cousin who had lived with the Mortons since her babyhood. Dorothy Smith was also his cousin. She and her mother lived in a cottage on Church Street.

“They must be over at Dorothy’s working up schemes for to-morrow,” Roger answered his grandfather’s question. “I haven’t seen them since luncheon.”

“How many do you expect at your party?”

“Just two or three more besides the United Service Club. James Hancock won’t be able to come, though. His leg isn’t well enough yet.”

“Pretty bad break?”

“He says it’s bad enough to make him remember not to cut corners when he’s driving a car. Any break is too bad in my humble opinion.”

“In mine, too. How many in the Club? Ten?”

“Ten; yes, sir. There’ll be nine of us to-morrow evening — Helen and the Ethels and Dorothy and Dicky and the two Watkinses and Margaret Hancock. She’s going to spend the night with Dorothy.”

“Anybody from school?”

“George Foster, the fellow who danced the minuet so well in our show; and Dr. Edward Watkins is coming out with Tom and Della.”

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“Isn’t he rather old to come to a kids’ party?”

“Of course he’s loads older than we are — he’s twenty-five — but he said he hadn’t been to a Hallowe’en party for so long that he wanted to come, and Tom and Della said he put up such a plaintive wail that they asked if they might bring him.”

“I suspect he hasn’t forgotten how to play,” chuckled Grandfather Emerson, speeding up as they entered the long, open stretch of road that ended almost at his own door. “Any idea what you’re going to do?”

“Not much. Helen and Ethel Brown are the decoration committee and I’m the jack-o’-lantern committee, as you know, and Ethel Blue and Dorothy are thinking up things to do and we’re all going to add suggestions. I think the girls had a note from Della this morning with an idea of some sort in it.”

“You ought to get Burns’s poem.”

“On Hallowe’en?”

“We’ll look it up when we get to the house. You may find some ‘doings’ you haven’t heard of that you can revive for the occasion.”

“We decided that whatever we did do, there were certain stunts we wouldn’t do.”

“Namely?”

“Swap signs and take off gates and brilliant jokes of that sort.”

“As a Service Club you couldn’t very well crack jokes whose poind: lies in some one’s discomfort, could you ?”

“Those things have looked like dog mean tricks to me and not jokes at all ever since I saw an old women at the upper end of Main Street trying to hang her gate last year the day after Hallowe’en.”

“Too heavy for her?”

“I should say so. She couldn’t do anything with it. I offered to help her, and she said, ‘You might as well, for I suppose you had the fun of unhanging it last night.’ ”

“A false accusation, I suppose.”

“It happened to be that time, but I had done it before,” confessed Roger, flushing.

“You never happened to see the result of it before.”

“That’s it. I just thought of the people’s surprise when they waked up in the morning and found their gates gone. I never thought at all of the real pain and discomfort that it may have given a lot of them.”

“Your Club may be doing a good service to all Rosemont if it proves that young people can have a good time without making the ‘innocent bystander’ pay for it.”

“We’re going to prove it; to ourselves, anyway,” insisted Roger stoutly, as he leaped out of the car and took his grandfather’s parcels into the house.

“The pumpkins are in the barn,” Mr. Emerson called after him. “Go down there and pick them out when you’ve given those bundles to your grandmother.”

The big yellow globes were loaded into the car — half a dozen of them — and Mr. Emerson drove back to the house. As he stopped at the side porch for a last word with his wife he gave a cry of recognition.

“Look who comes here 1” he exclaimed.

“Helen and Ethel Brown,” guessed Roger. “Don’t they look like those soldiers we read about in ‘Macbeth’ — the fellows who marched along holding boughs in their hands so that it looked as if Birnamwood had come to Dunsinane.”

“Roger is quoting Shakespeare about your personal appearance,” laughed Mr. Emerson as he and his grandson relieved the girls of their burdens.

They sank down on the steps of the porch and panted.

“You’re tired out,” exclaimed their grandmother. “Roger, bring out that pitcher of lemonade you’ll find in the dining-room. How far have you walked?”

“About a thousand miles, I should say,” declared Helen. “We were bound we’d get out-of-door decorations if they were to be had, and they weren’t to be had except by hunting.”

“You’re like me — I like to use out-of-door things as late as I can ; there are so many months when you have to go to the greenhouse or to draw on your house plants.”

“Ethel Blue and Dorothy have been educating the Club artistically. They’ve been pointing out how much color there is in the fields and the woods even after the bright autumn colors have gone by.”

“That’s quite true. Look at that meadow.”

Mrs. Emerson waved her hand at the field across the road. On it sedges were waving, softly brown; tufts of mouse-gray goldenrod nodded before the breeze; chestnut-hued cat-tails stood guard in thick ranks, and a delicate Indian Summer haze blended all into a harmony of warm, dull shades.

“You found your grapevine,” said Roger, pouring the lemonade for his weary sisters, and nodding toward a trail of handsome leaves, splendidly yellow.

“It took a hunt, though. What are you doing over here?”

“Getting the pumpkins Grandfather promised us.”

“You’re just in time to have a ride home,” said Mr. Emerson.

“You’re in no hurry, Father; let the girls rest a while,” urged Mrs. Emerson. “Can’t you make a jack-o’-lantern while you’re waiting, Roger?”

“Yes, ma'am, I can turn you out a truly superior article in a wonderfully short time,” bragged Roger.

“He really does make them very well,” confirmed Helen, “but it’s because he always has the benefit of our valuable advice.”

“Here you are to give it if I need it,” said Roger good naturedly. “We’ll show Grandmother what our united efforts can do.”

So the girls leaned back comfortably against the pillars at the sides of the steps and Mrs. Emerson sat in an arm chair at the top of the flight and Mr. Emerson sat in the car at the foot of the steps and Roger began his work.

“It’ll be a wonder if I make anything but a failure with so many bosses,” he complained.

“Keep your hand steady, old man,” teased his grandfather. “Don’t let your knife go through the side or you’ll let out a crack of light where you don’t mean to.”

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“Be sure your knife doesn’t slip and cut your fingers,” advised Mrs. Emerson.

“Save me the inside,” begged Ethel Brown. “I’m going to try to make a pumpkin pie.”

“Save the top for a hat,” laughed Helen. “I’ll trim it with brown ribbon and set a new style at school.”

Roger dug away industriously under the spur of these remarks.

“Is this the first year you’ve had a Hallowe’en party?” Mrs. Emerson asked.

“We used to do a few little things when we were children,” Helen answered; “but for the last few years we’ve been asked somewhere.”

“And with all due respect to our hosts we did a lot of the stupidest and meanest things we ever got let in for,” declared Roger. “I was telling Grandfather about some of them coming over.”

“So we made up our minds that we’d celebrate as a club this year, and do whatever we wanted to. There’s a lot more to a party than just the party,” said Ethel Brown wisely.

Her grandmother nodded.

“You’re right. The preparation is half the fun,” she agreed. “And it’s fun to have every part of it perfect — the decorations and the refreshments as well as whatever it is you do for your main amusement.”

“That’s what I think,” said Helen. “I like to think that the house is going to be appropriately dressed for our Hallowe’en party just as much as we ourselves.”

“Why doesn’t your club give a series of holiday parties?” suggested Grandfather. “Make each one of them a really appropriate celebration and not just an ordinary party hung on the holiday as an excuse peg. I believe you could have some interesting times and do some good, too, so that it could honestly be brought within the scope of your Club’s activities.”

“We seem to have made a start at it without thinking much about it,” said Roger. “The Club had a float, you know, in the Labor Day procession.”

“I didn’t know that!” exclaimed Mrs. Emerson.

“You were in New York for a day or two. Grandfather supplied the float! Why, we had just come back from Chautauqua a day or two before Labor Day, you know, and the first thing that happened was that a collector called to get a contribution from Mother to help out the Labor Day procession. I was there and I said I didn’t believe in taxation without representation. He laughed and said, ‘All right, come on. We’d be glad to have you in the procession.’ ”

“You were rather disconcerted at that, I suspect,” laughed Mrs. Emerson.

“Yes, I was, but I hated to take back water, so I said that I belonged to a club and that I supposed he was going to have all the clubs in Rosemont represented in some way. He said that was just what they wanted. They wanted every activity in the town to be shown in some shape or other.”

“There wasn’t time to call a meeting of the club,” Helen took up the story, “so Roger and I came over and talked with Grandfather, and he lent us a hay i7 rack and we dressed it up with boughs and got the carpenter to make some very large cut out letters — U. S. C. — two sets of them, so they could be read on both sides. They were painted white and stood up high among the green stuff and really looked very pretty. Everybody asked what it meant.”

“I think it helped a lot when I went about asking for gifts for the Christmas Ship,” said Roger. “Lots of people said, ‘Oh, it’s your club that had a float in the Labor Day parade.’ ”

“If we should work up Grandfather’s idea we might have a parade of our own another year,” said Helen.

“Always co-operate with what already exists, if it’s worthy,” advised Mr. Emerson. “Don’t get up opposition affairs unless there’s a good reason for doing it.”

“As there is for our Hallowe’en party,” insisted Roger.

“I believe you’re right there. There’s no reason why you should enter into ‘fool stunts’ that are just ‘fool stunts,’ not worth while in any way and not even funny.”

“We’d better move on now if Grandfather is to take us over and get back in time for his own dinner,” said Roger.

“Don’t forget that volume of Burns,” Mr. Emerson reminded him.

“Thank you for speaking of it. I shouldn’t have thought of it again,” and Roger dashed into the house.

He came back empty-handed, however.

“I took a peek in and I couldn’t make head or tail of that Scottish stuff,” he confessed. “I’m afraid you’ll have to make out a list of Brother Burns’s stunts if you don’t mind,” he begged. “We’d like to have some of the really old fashioned ceremonies if we knew what they were.”

“I’ll write some of them out for you and take them over in the morning,” promised Mr. Emerson. “Come, girls, can you pile in all that shrubbery without breaking it? Put the pumpkins on the bottom of the car, Roger, and the jacks on top of them. Now be careful where you put your feet. Back in half an hour, Mother,” and he started off with his laughing car load.

Chapter II The Witches' Cave And The Fairies' Palace

I T seemed to the Mortons especially fortunate that All Hallowe’en came this year on a Saturday, because it gave them the opportunity to prepare for their festivity with greater thoroughness than if it had been a school day.

Thoroughness was one of the characteristics of the Mortons as a family. Roger and Helen and Ethel Brown and Dicky were the children of Lieutenant Morton of the Navy and their cousin, Ethel Blue, who lived with them, was the daughter of Captain Morton of the Army, so that all the young people had been brought up with service ideas of perseverance and carefulness. Dorothy Smith, whose mother was a sister of Captain and Lieutenant Morton, had lived a wandering life until the past summer at Chautauqua had re-united Mrs. Smith with her family and had given the Mortons a new cousin in Dorothy. Poverty was now a thing of the past with the Smiths, but Dorothy would not soon forget the habits of carefulness that had been fostered by necessity.

The Mortons had not always lived in Rosemont. Like all Navy children they had always been ready during all their childhood to pack and go at brief notice to any new station to which their father was ordered. Ethel Blue went with them, for she had 19 been in her Aunt Marion Morton’s care all her life as her mother had died when she was a tiny baby. When, however, Roger came to be of high school age with Helen soon to follow him, Lieutenant Morton decided that it was best for so large a family to have a permanent dwelling place, and they had settled upon Rosemont, New Jersey, because Mrs. Morton’s father and mother, Mr. and Mrs. Emerson, lived there. There were good schools and it was near New York with its advantages, while at the same time it was far enough from the city for the air to be fresh and the people united in town interests.

Roger was now in his last year at the high school and Helen in her second, while the Ethels and Dorothy would graduate from the grammar school in June.

Dicky’s school career had begun the summer before in the Chautauqua kindergarten and was being continued in a new Montessori school just opened in Rosemont. Already he was astonishing his family with his new acquirements. They had long since ceased to be astonished at his independence of spirit and at the initiative which made him undertake all sorts of matters which children of his age usually begin only on the suggestion of their elders.

Dicky was giving his family the benefit of his opinions on decorations for All Hallowe’en on this Saturday morning.

“What’th Hallowe’en?” he had inquired.

“The night when witches and fairies and elves are very lively,” answered Ethel Brown, tucking a spray of bittersweet over a curtain pole and standing back to observe the effect.

“Mary thayth there aren’t any witcheth.”

“There aren’t. But it’s fun to pretend there are.”

Dicky’s face cleared. It had disturbed him to think that either Mary, his old nurse, whose word was law to him, had been mistaken, or that Ethel Brown had more recent information on the subject of these mysterious, invisible creatures.

“You jutht going to pretend to-night?”

“That’s all. No matter what you see or hear you needn’t be afraid. It’s all just pretend.”

“Where you going to pretend their houthe ith ?” demanded Dicky, his practical mind at work on providing comforts for the witches for whom he now felt a friendly responsibility.

“That’s a good idea,” Ethel Brown instantly said to Ethel Blue. “Let’s fix up one room as a witches’ cave.”

“And another as the home of the fairies.”

“The cave ought to be dark and goo-ey.”

“And the fairies’ house ought to be bright and

gay. •”

“We’d better take the dining room for the cave; the paper is darker to start with.”

“And the high woodwork.”

“Fill the doorway with boughs. Don’t you know how explorers always have to push into caverns through overhanging boughs,” contributed Roger.

“That’s good. We can put a lot of hemlock there.”

“And more hemlock inside.”

“And hang a piece of black cambric on the wall with a skull drawn on it in phosphorus. It will shine in the darkness.”

“At one end of the room hang a black drapery with white cloth stars and crescents fastened on it.”

“How shall we light it? Electricity or gas would be altogether too bright.”

“That’s the place to burn a pan of salt wet with alcohol. It makes the queerest green light you ever saw. It makes everybody look ghastly.”

“I move you, Madam President,” called out Dorothy to Helen who was the president of the United Service Club to which they all belonged, and whom the members liked to address occasionally in this formal way, “that we do the Witches’ Cave first.”

“That’s a good idea. We know just what sort of material we want for that and when it’s done we can see what we have left for the other rooms.”

They all set to work on the dining room. Mrs. Morton, passing through, as they finished, remarked that it was a dreary sight.

“I rather hate to think of dining here, I must say,” commented Mrs. Morton.

“That’s a great compliment to our success, Aunt Marian,” laughed Ethel Blue.

“If Dr. Hancock would only lend his skeleton ro James and Margaret it would be just the right finish,” sighed Helen, gazing with satisfaction at the result. “Aunt Louise is laughing at the idea.”

“I call this a very successful room,” smiled Mrs. Smith. “Do you approve, Dicky?”

“Mary thayth witcheth have black catth,” he reminded the decorators.

“So they do ! We’d forgotten the cats.”

“What can we do about them?”

“Dorothy has made some stuffed cats for the Christmas Ship. We might borrow them for the occasion. It won’t hurt them at all if we put them up high where no one will touch them.”

“They aren’t black,” objected Dorothy.

“We’ll have to pretend they were some adopted cats. Isn’t there a story about cats turning black after they’ve lived with the witches a while ? How about that, Dicky?”

“I don’t know. I’ll athk Mary,” and Dicky trotted off to the kitchen to secure the desired information.

“I believe Margaret said she had some black cats on a red background — paper ones,” said Helen. “I’ll call her up and ask her.”

“Mary thayth the catth that run away from home are any color and that they turn black becauthe they’re living with wicked witcheth,” announced Dicky, returning from his search for information, just a bit wide-eyed over the naturalness of Mary’s explanation. There seemed also to be possibilities of danger in it for small boys who wandered too far away from the front yard. If the witches caught them their color might change like the cats’. There had been times when he had gone farther away than Mary had thought wise. Was it possible he had had a narrow escape? Perhaps after all Prudence was worth cultivating.

“Let’s call the dining room done,” decided Roger. “Where shall we go now, Madam President?”

“Let’s do the reception room as the Fairies’ Palace. It ought to be bright, and we haven’t suitable decorations for it, so we must take a small room.”

“Any way, Hallowe’en is mysterious and the house ought all to be in a half light,” said Aunt Louise, who was making paper roses for the fairies’ palace.

“That’s so. We’ll have just one very bright place for the fairies, and I should think the light of the jack-o’-lanterns would be enough for the rest of the house, shouldn’t you ?”

“Certainly quite enough for the hall and the living room.”

“Here’s for the fairies’ palace, then, Come on. Let’s decide what we shall put in here,” and Ethel Blue ran to the little room beside the front door and scrutinized it carefully, the rest looking over her shoulder.

“It must be as bright as we can have it, in the first place,” she decided.”

“That means we mustn’t cover up the lights in any way.”

“We ought to increase them if we could.”

“Is there any sort of reflector we can get hold of?”

“I have two or three of those Japanese wind glasses at home,” said Mrs. Smith. “They are slips of glass, you know, and they shine in the light and make a soft tinkling when a breeze blows them against each other.”

“Fairy music!” cried Ethel Blue. “Oh, may we have those, Aunt Louise?”

“Dorothy can run home and get them now. And, Dorothy, there’s a handful of fuzzy tinsel, the Christmas tree kind, in the long drawer of my desk. Bring that. That will shine.”

“I passed the tin shop the other day and I noticed on the floor a heap of bits of bright new tin glittering like silver,” suggested Roger.

“Why couldn’t we get some and string the bits on a fine cord that wouldn’t show and let them dangle?”

“They wouldn’t look very pretty — just bits of tin — unless we partly concealed them,” said Helen meditatively.

“Is the asparagus all gone,” demanded Dorothy suddenly. “If it hasn’t been frost nipped we could decorate the room with that, it’s so delicate and feathery, and let the garlands of shining tin show through. Then you’d see just the shine.”

“ — and not the ignoble material that caused it. A good idea, Dorothy,” applauded her aunt.

Roger departed promptly on an investigating trip to the garden accompanied by his orderly, Dicky.

“Here you are,” he cried, coming back with an armful. “Some of it is still pretty green and some of it is straw color, but it’s all feathery and delicate and as pretty as can be.”

“Fairieth will like that for their houthe,” pronounced Dicky with decision.

“Dicky is our authority on what the invisibles like and don’t like,” smiled Dicky’s mother.

“Mary thayth,” Dicky quoted his authority, “that fairieth are tho thmall you can’t thee ’em, tho they mutht like little thmall leaveth like thothe that they can thee through.”

“That’s well thought out,” agreed Roger. “Of course a fairy couldn’t see his way about if there were big leaves in his way any more than we could if all our trees had leaves like some of those huge affairs on the tropical trees.”

The girls were placing sprays of the asparagus lightly wherever they could attach them, not banking them as they had the hemlock in the dining room, but trying to give an effect of airiness. The pale straw-colored stalks they found lent themselves admirably to this effect.

“It’s perfectly ducky!” announced Ethel Blue. “It makes me feel like poetry !”

When Roger returned from his expedition to the tin shop they all sat down to tie the bits of tin with which he was laden on to lengths of string.

“Look out you don’t cut your fingers. The edges are sharp,” he cautioned them, his own thumb in his mouth to show that he spoke with feeling.

When the lines were finished there was enough to loop generously around the little room and it glistened through the asparagus shield as brilliantly as if it were really silver.

“That’s the cheapest decoration I ever came across,” announced Roger. “The tinman was only too delighted to give me all my basket would hold. These scraps are of no use to him and he was glad to have me clean up his floor.”

“Mother’s roses are lovely,” and Dorothy stood

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on tiptoe to tuck one in among the tiny leaflets of a bit of green asparagus. Wreaths of roses swung from the electrolier to the wall and shone reflected in the gleaming musical glasses that tinkled with every breath of air. Mrs. Morton allowed Roger to take off the colored shades from the electric lights and to substitute lily-shaped bells of white crepe paper. The furniture was pushed back against the wall, and was half concealed by festoons of asparagus and by the wings of thin cloth that the girls had used in a butterfly dance which they had given earlier in the autumn.

“It is all delicate — the color and the materials” — approved Mrs. Smith.

“And it shines and it tinkles. I believe the fairies will like it,” and Ethel Blue gave a skip of satisfaction.

“Now, then, let’s do the hall and the living room.”

“We must be sure to leave plenty of space in the center of both rooms for the apple bobbing and the stunts that we’ll need to move about in,” Roger reminded them, speaking of the hall as a room because it was a large square entrance way, almost as large as the living room itself.

“There’s an old rug in the attic that you can stand your tub of water on. Ask Mary to tell you just where it is,” directed Mrs. Morton.

“We ought to have one or two small tables that can’t be hurt and that can be moved about easily,” said Ethel Brown.

“I’ve read somewhere that Hallowe’en used to be a harvest festival,” said Helen, who always could be depended upon to find out historical connections. “Why can’t we do these two rooms with that in mind?”

“Shocks of corn and bundles of oats and sichlike,” agreed Roger. “Not bad.”

“Quite the contrary — very good,” retorted Ethel Brown smartly. “And we can work in all the vines and bittersweet that Helen and I got yesterday.”

“Your grandfather brought over the machine this morning filled with tall cornstalks and oats, and your grandmother sent a dozen ears of red corn,” announced Mrs. Morton.

“Let’s tie a lot of cornstalks to the post at the foot of the stairs,” suggested Dorothy. “It will look almost as if it were out in the field.”

“Here are some beautiful stalks,” announced Ethel Brown, looking over the supply that Roger brought in from the back porch and spread on the hall floor on a dust sheet that Mary gave him for the purpose. “We can put them up singly beside the doors and windows.”

“Our yellow grapevine is lovely,” said Helen. “It’s long enough to wander up the side of the front window and over the top.”

“Let the bittersweet come from behind the backs of the pictures,” urged Ethel Blue.”

“Here’s a whole armful of brown sedge grass. Where, oh, where?” inquired Roger, sorting it out from a general pile.

“In this jar, on the floor, I say, and the cat-tails in that other. They look tall and impressive.”

“And one jack-o’-lantern at the foot of the stairs and one in the opposite corner, and two in the living room.”

“One at the turn of the stairs would be effective.”

“And one smiling a welcome on the front porch.”

“Your Aunt Louise and I will stay in the library out of the turmoil. You can put a jack on guard at the door.”

“Be sure to look over all the articles you will need to use,” suggested Mrs. Morton. “You know in the theatres they have a man to attend to just that. Who’s your property man?”

“We’ll go through our program and see what we want,” answered Helen. “I guess we’ll all have to take a hand in gathering the things. Roger will have to pull some vegetables from the garden.”

“And we’ll need saucers and candles.”

“The nut boats aren’t started yet.”

“And the nuts aren’t cracked.”

“The cookies are done, though.”

“Prompt little Ethel Brown!”

“And the gingerbread.”

“Good little Ethel Blue!”

“I’ve polished the apples so they almost sparkle.”

“Great old Dorothy.”

“And the raisins are ready.”

“Splendid President.”

“Your grandfather said he was interested in your party because you were going to show that you were a service club at the same time that you were enjoying yourselves. Have you planned how you’re going to accomplish that?” asked Mrs. Morton.

“Yes, Mother, we have, but if you don’t mind we’d like to surprise you with that part of the program.”

“Very well. I know I can depend on you not to be silly or unkind.”