Jacqueline waked early on her first morning at the Conway farm. With a rooster crowing under your window, you need no alarm clock, and with a cozy six-year-old at your side, inclined to snuggle on a warm morning, you have no inducements to lie abed.

So Jacqueline jumped up and dressed herself. She put on the Peggy Janes that she had marked with approval the night before, and she slipped her bare feet into Caroline’s old sneakers. She washed her face and hands at the marble-topped washstand. The washbasin had a green landscape in the bottom, very pleasant to look at through the clear water, but the pitcher belonged to a different set and was ornamented with purple bands.

Nellie chattered in a lively manner all through the hasty dressing process, mostly about some new kittens and a rooster named General Pershing. She dressed herself very handily, but she didn’t scorn Jacqueline’s help when it came to the back buttons of her underwaist and overalls.

Early as the children were, they found, when they climbed down the funny steep stairs into the kitchen, that Grandma and Aunt Martha and the babies were up before them.

“That’s a nice rig for the country, Jackie,” Aunt Martha said approvingly, as she spied the Peggy Janes. “I’m glad you didn’t bring any starched up city notions to the farm. There’s time and place for everything, of course,” she added tolerantly, “but high heeled shoes and frilly dresses don’t go with the soil.”

Freddie had remembered Jacqueline over night, perhaps because of the piece of shapeless chocolate that she had popped into his mouth. He threw himself upon her with gurgles of greeting.

“He takes to you all right,” said Grandma, as she paused with a pan of biscuits in her hand, midway from stove to table. “I wonder now if a smart girl like you couldn’t take it on herself to dress him mornings. Every minute counts this time o’ day, and your Aunt Martha has her hands full.”

“Sure I will,” Jacqueline promised airily. She was promising only for a few days—just as few as she chose to make them. And she really did like Freddie. He was more fun than a puppy dog.

“Just pump that pitcher full of water, Jackie, and fill the glasses at the table,” Aunt Martha struck in briskly. “Ring the bell, Nellie. Breakfast’s about ready.”

Nellie sprang on a chair, and took down a big dinner bell from the shelf above the stove. But she didn’t ring it at the foot of the stairs to rouse her sleepy brothers—oh, no! She went out on the doorstone in the soft clear morning air, and she clanged that bell as if all Longmeadow Street were burning up.

Very quickly the three boys came scuffling in from the barn and sheds where they had been doing the first chores of the day. They washed hurriedly at the sink—so hurriedly that Aunt Martha sent Neil back to do it all over again. Then they sat down to breakfast in the shabby, homely dining room, that wasn’t a bit like the rural interiors that Jacqueline had seen on the stage and in the movies.

There were no frills about that breakfast any more than there had been about the supper. On the table was a big plate of hot raised biscuits, fluffy and light, and a platter of freshly cooked hash, meat and potatoes (more potatoes than meat!) warmed on the stove in what Aunt Martha called a “spider,” crisp and brown on the outside, soft and savory within. There was milk for the children, and coffee in a shiny tin pot for Aunt Martha and Grandma. Freddie and Annie had porridge. Aunt Martha fed Annie spoonsful with one hand, and ate her own breakfast with the other.

Both at Buena Vista and at school, fried things and hot breads had been considered unhygienic. Being forbidden, they had always seemed to Jacqueline desirable. She ate two helpings of hash and three biscuits and a half. She wanted to eat four, the same as Dickie did, but she had to give up, beaten. She could chew still, but she couldn’t swallow.

“Now you and Nellie see how nice you can clear the table and wash the dishes, and then put the dining room to rights,” said Aunt Martha, as if she asked the most natural thing in the world. “Grandma’ll be here to oversee. I’ve got to go down to the ten acre, and see if that Polack is on the job, or just getting over the christening party they had last night at the Corners.”

Aunt Martha tied on a straw hat, nodded to her family, and went her competent way. The boys went, too, quite like men of business. In these days of high wages, when Polish farm-hands expected fifty cents an hour, you either let your youngsters work in the fields, or closed up shop and went “on the town,” Grandma told Jacqueline, as one who endured what could not be cured. Ralph was as good as a man on the place, she added proudly. He’d be weeding onions now until the sun got too hot. Dickie and Neil would be working in the vegetable garden, which supplied the family table and a few good paying customers on Longmeadow Street.

“They’ll be hungry as horses by noon,” said Grandma. “I guess I’ll flax round and stir ’em up some gingerbread.”

Grandma seemed chief cook of the establishment. Already she had baked a batch of bread since she got up, and had dried-apple pies to pop into the oven, and a piece of meat—to Jacqueline it looked mostly bone and gristle—simmering on the back of the stove, lest it spoil in the hot weather. She now mixed gingerbread, as spry as you please, and meantime gave directions about putting Annie outside in the baby pen, and taking the table-leavings to the hens, and setting another kettle of hot water to boil.

“You’ll need some rinsing water or your dishes will be streaked,” she told Jacqueline. “There’s a right way and a wrong way to do everything, even dishes, and it’s just as easy to do it right as wrong.” Jacqueline didn’t mind, for one day only. She thought dish washing rather a game. She and Nellie brought the things out from the dining room.

“Take the tray,” said Grandma, “and bring a lot at a time. Always made your head save your heels.”

Then they rinsed the milky glasses, and they scraped the plates. Jacqueline was going to add to the scraps for the hens the bit of hash that was on the platter, but Grandma stopped her with a gesture of positive horror.

“Mercy, child! Don’t throw away good clean victuals, even if the war is over. Put it in that clean little cracked dish. It’ll warm up nice and tasty for somebody’s supper. The butter goes in that stone jar. Let those biscuits cool before you put ’em into the bread box. Never shut up hot bread in a close box, or it’ll spoil on you.”

What a lot of things to remember, thought Jacqueline! This was more exciting than mental arithmetic.

She washed the dishes just as Grandma told her, and Nellie wiped them painstakingly. First they did the glasses, then “the silver”—poor plated ware that it was!

“Be sure to get the tines of the forks clean,” cautioned Grandma. “And remember, when we have eggs, not to plump your silver and your dishes into hot water, or you’ll cook the egg right to ’em. Wash eggy things first in cold water, always.” After the silver, came the plates and the cups, and last of all “the calicoes,” as Grandma called the cooking dishes. Then the dish pan must be scalded, and the dish towels set to boil upon the stove, and while they were boiling, Jacqueline brushed up the dining room, rather an amateurish job, but Grandma said she took hold handily. Then Jacqueline and Nellie, each with a big square of soft cloth, dusted the dining room furniture, and last of all, they hung their dish towels out in the warm sun to dry.

By that time Jacqueline had had enough of housework. She was ready to say so, and to quit right then and there. But Grandma said:

“You’re a big help, Jackie. Your aunt’s awful busy outside, and I’m not as quick on my feet as I was. Some days it seems like I’d never get through step-stepping.”

Well, when a little old lady says a thing like that to you, of course you can’t flop down on the dining-room couch with a story paper and leave her to work all alone. So while Nellie kept an eye on Freddie and Annie, Jacqueline went upstairs with Grandma and did the chamber work and had her first lesson in bed-making. As there were four beds, besides Freddie’s crib, she had had quite a lot of practice by the time they finished.

“Make a handsome bed, you’ll get a handsome husband, they used to tell me when I was a girl,” chuckled Grandma. “You want to do your best, Jackie, unless you aim to be one o’ these new women that get along without men folks.”

After the beds were made, Jacqueline and Nellie each had a piece of gingerbread, and they took two big pieces for Dickie and Neil, and went out to them in the garden. It was quite a big garden, with poles of beans and rows of peas, trained up on dry bushes, tomato plants and cucumber vines, beets and lettuce, squash and pumpkins. But there were no onions. You got onions by the peck out of the great fields that spread all round the farm. For the Conways, like their neighbors, put all their land into onions, and on the price of onions their fortunes hung.

They dined at noon at the Conway farm, and dinner was all of cold things, so as not to heat the kitchen in the middle of the day. There was ready cooked cereal, and a pitcher of milk. There were great slices of home-made bread, with home-made plum jam. (Jacqueline had gone down with Grandma into the deep cold cellar where the food was kept, and she had seen the shelves where the jars of home-canned fruits and vegetables lived. Next time she could go down herself and save Grandma’s old legs.) There was cottage cheese, and lettuce, and sliced tomatoes. There was gingerbread—all the gingerbread that any one could wish to eat.

After the dinner dishes were cleared away and left to be washed at night when it was cooler, Aunt Martha and Grandma sat down to sew and mend for their big family.

“We’ll have to count on you to do your own mending,” Aunt Martha told Jacqueline. “But you just run out to the barn now, and play.”

Jacqueline went. She wanted to see those kittens. She also wanted to try some hazardous stunts that she had thought up, as soon as she had seen the beams and ladders in the barn. Neil and Nellie came with her, and Dickie presently joined them. Of course Dickie could do acrobatic feats that none of them could equal. But Jacqueline felt she did pretty well at balancing on her hands for the first time, and she could put her ankle behind her neck as well as any of them.

She thought they had been playing only the least little while, but really it was in the middle of the afternoon when the big bell rang. They scampered at once to the house. That was the law of the farm: always run when you hear the bell, or you may miss something you wouldn’t like to miss.

Aunt Martha was on the doorstone, talking to a bearded man in a muddy Ford.

“Hurry up!” she called, as soon as the children came within earshot. “Here’s Mr. Griswold driving up to town and he has room for two. Get your purse, Jackie. Here’s a chance to buy you that toothbrush. Neil, you can go with her and show her the way home. You’ll have to hoof it back, unless you find somebody coming down to the Meadows that will give you a lift.”

Adventure beckoned! Jacqueline thought nothing of the walk through the dust in the heat. She flew upstairs and got Caroline’s shabby purse, and flew down again. Perhaps where they were going, she could get a soda, one for herself and one, of course, for Neil.

Aunt Martha must have read her thoughts.

“Now don’t you go wasting that money,” she ordered. “You ought to get you a brush for fifteen cents at Miss Crevey’s. You bring back thirty-five cents.”

“Oh, Aunt Martha!” protested Jacqueline.

“Don’t you forget what I say.” Aunt Martha fixed Jacqueline with gray eyes that looked her through and through. “Jump in now. Mr. Griswold’s waiting.”

Jacqueline didn’t stop to argue. She jumped in, and Neil jumped in beside her, and away they rattled with the friendly neighboring farmer, through the hot-smelling fields of green onions. As they rattled along, a heartening thought came to Jacqueline. She had fifty cents in her purse, and two pennies. Aunt Martha had said nothing about the pennies. She could spend them. She didn’t quite know what you could get for two cents, that was good, but there must be something.

Mr. Griswold put down his little passengers at the Orthodox church in Longmeadow Street. He was going on to Northford himself to get a young pig in a crate.

“Now show me the shop,” Jacqueline bade Neil. She had taken command of him, much as she had taken command of Caroline. “And I’ve got two pennies to spend as I please.”

“Gee!” said Neil. “That’s great.”

He meant it, too. Jacqueline looked at him in wonder. She counted her spending money usually, when she troubled herself to count it at all, in dimes and quarters, never in copper pennies.

They went into Miss Crevey’s shop. A funny little shop Jacqueline thought it, and she thought Miss Crevey with her false front, and her ill-fitted false teeth, and her alpaca sleeves, was like a character in a story book. They got the toothbrush readily enough—that part of the shopping was simple and uninteresting. But to spend the precious two pennies was different. There was such a choice of things for a penny—a tiny glass measure of hard red and white candies—or a stick of gum—or two large white peppermints—or a stick of striped candy. Jacqueline wanted the gum very much, for at home she had never been allowed to chew it. But Neil, she could see, hungered for a dreadful confection of molasses, imperfectly covered with chocolate.

“We’ll get both,” suggested Jacqueline.

“Well—you see——” Neil hesitated. “If we get all those little jiggers for a penny, we’ll have something to take home to the kids.”

Jacqueline looked at him and slowly reddened. She hadn’t thought of the kids. Indeed she had thought two pennies hardly big enough to divide between two children, let alone five. But Neil had thought of the younger ones.

“We’ll have that chocolate stick, please,” Jacqueline told Miss Crevey with sudden generous resolve, “and a glass dingus of the little jigs. After all, I don’t care for gum.”

And just as she said the words, she heard the door creak open behind her and she turned her head. There on the threshold stood a prim lady in a white summer frock, and with her a little girl in a posy-strewn muslin (Jacqueline’s muslin!) who looked as scared as if she had seen a ghost, and the little girl, of course, was Caroline!