“Little red riding hood, where are you going?”

“Going to see my grandmother,” replied Flaxie Frizzle, peeping out from under her scarlet hood. “And here’s a pat of butter for her in this wee, wee basket.”

“My dear Red Riding Hood, your grandmother is too sick to eat butter. Shut the door, walk very softly, and bring me my writing-desk. I’m going to write Aunt Charlotte, and ask her if she wants you at Hilltop.”

“Oh, mamma, how elegant! Is it ’cause grandma’s sick?” cried Flaxie, dropping her wee, wee basket, butter and all. She ought to have been ashamed to find she was so noisy that she had to be sent away from home; but she never thought about that. She did try to keep still, but as she had said to Julia that very morning, “there wasn’t any still in her!”

“Oh, let me write it myself to Milly; please let me write it myself.”

Flaxie was seven years old now, and had actually learned how to scribble pretty fast. She was very proud of this, for Milly could do nothing but print.

She seized a postal card, ruled it downhill with a pencil, and wrote on it a few cramped-up words, huddled close together like dried apples on a string:

“Dear Twin Little Cousin: My Mamma is going to let me go to your House and go to school to your Dear teacher, becaus I make too much noise, and Grammy is sick with Something in her back and Ime glad but not unless your Mamma is willing. Wont you please to write and say so. My lines are unstraight, and its real too bad Good by Flaxie Frizzle.”

Mrs. Gray smiled when her little daughter asked how to spell unstraight, and smiled again when she saw the card and read, “Dear twin little cousin.”

“Oh, I know better than that,” explained Flaxie, blushing: “we’re not twins a bit, and couldn’t be if we should try, and we’ve known it for quite a long time; but you see, mamma, we’re make-believing, just for fun.”

“I never saw such a child for ‘make-believing,’” said Mrs. Gray, kissing Flaxie, who skipped gayly out of the room to pack her valise.

She always packed it, if there was the least thing said about going away. She didn’t mind the trouble, it was such a pretty valise,—made of brown canvas, with leather straps like a trunk. And she knew Aunt Charlotte would want her at Hilltop,—people always do want little girls, and can’t have too many of them,—and it was best to be ready in season.

So she looked up her little umbrella, with F. F. painted on it in white letters, her school-books that she had been playing school with all over the house, and a half bushel or so of her best dolls. But as she did not go for a week, she had time to lose these things over and over, and some of them were never found any more.

“Now, darling,” said mamma, when Flaxie had bidden good-bye to papa and Preston, and Ninny and the baby, and was just entering the car behind her friend Mrs. Prim. “Now, darling, don’t be troublesome to dear Aunt Charlotte, and if you’ll learn to be good and orderly and sweet like your Cousin Milly, I shall be so glad.”

Flaxie pondered upon this speech as she sat rattling along in the cars, munching peanuts, while Mrs. Prim took care of the shells.

“Troublesome. Oh, my! ’s if I ever troubled anybody! ’Cept Grandma Gray; and that’s ’cause she’s got something in her back. But mamma always thinks Milly is nicer than me! Queer what makes mammas never like their own little girls!—I mean, not much. Now Aunt Charlotte thinks I’m the nicest. She scolds to Milly sometimes, but she don’t scold to ME!”

Hilltop had been green when Flaxie left it, but now it was white, and seemed lovelier than ever, for Johnny had a new sled, and was “such a kind-hearted boy!” That is, he was always ready to draw the twin cousins on the ice till they were half frozen and begged him to stop, and I hardly see how he could have been kinder than that!

Then the school was “perfickly elegant,” taught by that same dear teacher, Miss Pike. What if her nose was red, and her mouth so large that little Betty Chase called her “the lady that can’t shut her face”? She was just lovely for all that, and Flaxie and Milly couldn’t forget that she had saved the schoolhouse when it was set on fire by mistake. After that she hadn’t looked homely a minute,—only “a beautiful homely,” that is ever and ever so much better than handsome;—and the little girls fairly adored her.

Now Flaxie was quick to learn, but as a general thing she didn’t study very hard, I am obliged to confess. When she couldn’t spell her lessons she said to Milly, “It’s ’cause you don’t have the same kind of books we have where I live. The words look so queer in your books!”

If Flaxie was noisy at Laurel Grove, what was she at Hilltop? Sometimes in the evening, when she played the piano and sang, Aunt Charlotte was really afraid she would disturb Mrs. Hunter, who lived in the other half of the house.

“Oh, I like it,” said Mrs. Hunter, pleasantly; “but don’t you think, Mrs. Allen, there is danger of her pounding your piano in pieces?”

But by and by there wasn’t so much time for music and play. The busy season had begun, when everybody was making ready for Christmas; and the twin cousins had as much as they could do in talking over what they were going to do, as they sat in each other’s lap and looked at their work-baskets.

Flaxie wanted to make a marvellous silk bedquilt for her dear mamma out of pieces as big as a dollar; but, finding there wouldn’t be time for that, concluded to buy her a paper of needles, “if it didn’t cost too much.”

Probably there wouldn’t have been anything done but talking if Aunt Charlotte hadn’t brought out some worsteds and canvas and set the helpless little ones at work upon a holder called the “Country Cousin.” They had a hard time over this young lady, and almost wished sometimes that she had never been born; but she turned out very brilliant at last, in a yellow skirt, red waist, and blue bonnet, with a green parasol over her head. After this they had courage to make some worsted balls for the babies, some cologne mats for their brothers who never used cologne, and some court-plaster cases for somebody else, with the motto, “I stick to you when others cut you.”

Both the children were tired with all this labor, and Flaxie discovered, after her presents were packed and ready to send off by express, that she didn’t feel very well.

“My throat is so sore I can’t swoler,”—so she wrote on a postal to her mother; for when she was sick she wanted everybody to know it.

Before Aunt Charlotte heard of the sad condition of her throat, she had said she might go with Milly and Johnny and some of the older children in the village, to see the ladies trim the church. But when Flaxie came into the parlor with her teeth chattering, Aunt Charlotte began to fear she ought not to go out.

“Are you so very chilly, my dear?”

“Yes ’m, I am,” replied Flaxie, with a doleful look around the corners of her mouth. “This house isn’t heated by steam like my house where I live, and I’m drefful easy to freeze!” And her teeth chattered again.

Aunt Charlotte looked anxious, as she drew on her gloves.

“My child, you’d better not go to the church, for it’s rather cold there.”

“Cold as a barn,” put in Johnny.

“Oh, auntie, do please, lemme go! I’m cold, but it’s a warm cold though,” said Flaxie, eagerly; and her teeth stopped chattering.

“I’m sorry, Flaxie, but there’s a chill in the air like snow, and if your throat is sore it is much wiser for you to stay at home,” said Aunt Charlotte, gently but firmly, like a good mother who is accustomed to be obeyed by her children.

And poor Flaxie was obliged to submit, though it cut her to the heart when Milly gave her a light kiss and skipped away; and she did think it was cruel in Aunt Charlotte to advise her to go into the nursery and stay with Nancy and the baby. She wished she had never said a word about her throat.

“It don’t feel any worse’n a mosquito-bite,” thought she, watching the gay party from the window,—half a dozen ladies and as many children; “it don’t hurt me to swallow either,”—swallowing her tears.

“Hilltop’s such a queer place! Not the least speck of steam in the houses! If they had steam, you could go anywhere, if your throat was sore! And I never saw anybody trim a church; and oh, Milly says they’ll have beau-tiful flowers, and crosses, and things! I never saw anybody trim anything—’cept a loaf of cake and flowers on a bonnet.”

Foolish Flaxie, to stand there winking tears into her eyes! You would have known better; you would have gone into the nursery to play with that lovely baby; but there were times, I am sorry to say, when Flaxie really enjoyed being unhappy. So now she stood still, rolling her little trouble over and over, as boys roll a snowball, making it larger and larger, till presently it was as big as a mountain.

“Auntie said I might go, and then she wouldn’t lemme! Made me stay at home to play with that ole baby! He’s squirmy and wigglesome; what do I want to play with him for, when she said I might go? I like good aunties; I don’t like the kind that tell lies.

“Oh, my throat is growing sore, and I’m going off up-stairs to stay in the cold, and get sick, ’cause they ought to keep steam; and then I guess auntie’ll be sorry!”

I grieve to tell you this about Flaxie, for I fear you will not like a little girl who could be so very naughty.

When the happy party of church-trimmers came home at tea-time, there she was up-stairs in the “doleful dumps;” and it was a long while before Milly could coax her down.

When she came at last, her face was a sight to behold—all purple, and spotted, and striped; for a fit of crying always gave her the appearance of measles. She consented to take a seat at table, but ate little, said nothing, and gazed mournfully at her plate.

This distressed Aunt Charlotte, but she asked no questions, and tried to keep Johnny talking, so he would not notice his afflicted little cousin.

“Now what does make you act so?” asked Milly, as soon as tea was over.

“‘Got a cricket in my neck;
Can’t move it a single speck,’”

replied Flaxie, not knowing she had made poetry, till Johnny, who was supposed to be ever so far off, began to laugh; and then she moved her neck fast enough, and shook her head, and stamped her foot.

“Let’s go in the nursery, so Johnny can’t plague you,” said the peace-loving Milly. “I’m so sorry you’re sick.”

Flaxie had not meant to speak, but she could not help talking to Milly.

“Wish I’se at home,” said she, reproachfully, “’cause my mamma keeps pepmint.”

“Why, Flaxie, my mamma keeps it too. We’ve got lots and lots of it in the cupboard.”

“Don’t care if you have,” snapped Flaxie. “I just despise pepmint. It’s something else I want, and can’t think of the name of; but I know you don’t keep it, for your papa isn’t a doctor!”

It was not the first time Flaxie had wounded her sweet cousin’s feelings by this same cutting remark.

“Dr. Papa keeps tittlish powders in blue and white papers, and one of the papers buzzes. I guess he’d give me that, but I don’t know,” added Flaxie, crying again harder than ever, though the tears fell like fire on her poor, sore cheeks.