



Produced by Charles Keller.  HTML version by Al Haines.








Rebecca Of Sunnybrook Farm


by

Kate Douglas Wiggin




TO MY MOTHER


  Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair;
  Like Twilight's, too, her dusky hair;
  But all things else about her drawn
  From May-time and the cheerful Dawn;
  A dancing Shape, an Image gay,
  To haunt, to startle, and way-lay.

                            Wordsworth.




CONTENTS


      I.  "WE ARE SEVEN"
     II.  REBECCA'S RELATIONS
    III.  A DIFFERENCE IN HEARTS
     IV.  REBECCA'S POINT OF VIEW
      V.  WISDOM'S WAYS
     VI.  SUNSHINE IN A SHADY PLACE
    VII.  RIVERBORO SECRETS
   VIII.  COLOR OF ROSE
     IX.  ASHES OF ROSES
      X.  RAINBOW BRIDGES
     XI.  "THE STIRRING OF THE POWERS"
    XII.  "SEE THE PALE MARTYR"
   XIII.  SNOW-WHITE; ROSE-RED
    XIV.  MR. ALADDIN
     XV.  THE BANQUET LAMP
    XVI.  SEASONS OF GROWTH
   XVII.  GRAY DAYS AND GOLD
  XVIII.  REBECCA REPRESENTS THE FAMILY
    XIX.  DEACON ISRAEL'S SUCCESSOR
     XX.  A CHANGE OF HEART
    XXI.  THE SKY LINE WIDENS
   XXII.  CLOVER BLOSSOMS AND SUNFLOWERS
  XXIII.  THE HILL DIFFICULTY
   XXIV.  ALADDIN RUBS HIS LAMP
    XXV.  ROSES OF JOY
   XXVI.  OVER THE TEACUPS
  XXVII.  "THE VISION SPLENDID"
 XXVIII.  "TH' INEVITABLE YOKE"
   XXIX.  MOTHER AND DAUGHTER
    XXX.  "GOOD-BY, SUNNYBROOK!"
   XXXI.  AUNT MIRANDA'S APOLOGY




REBECCA OF SUNNYBROOK FARM



I

"WE ARE SEVEN"

The old stage coach was rumbling along the dusty road that runs from
Maplewood to Riverboro. The day was as warm as midsummer, though it was
only the middle of May, and Mr. Jeremiah Cobb was favoring the horses
as much as possible, yet never losing sight of the fact that he carried
the mail. The hills were many, and the reins lay loosely in his hands
as he lolled back in his seat and extended one foot and leg luxuriously
over the dashboard. His brimmed hat of worn felt was well pulled over
his eyes, and he revolved a quid of tobacco in his left cheek.

There was one passenger in the coach,--a small dark-haired person in a
glossy buff calico dress. She was so slender and so stiffly starched
that she slid from space to space on the leather cushions, though she
braced herself against the middle seat with her feet and extended her
cotton-gloved hands on each side, in order to maintain some sort of
balance. Whenever the wheels sank farther than usual into a rut, or
jolted suddenly over a stone, she bounded involuntarily into the air,
came down again, pushed back her funny little straw hat, and picked up
or settled more firmly a small pink sun shade, which seemed to be her
chief responsibility,--unless we except a bead purse, into which she
looked whenever the condition of the roads would permit, finding great
apparent satisfaction in that its precious contents neither disappeared
nor grew less. Mr. Cobb guessed nothing of these harassing details of
travel, his business being to carry people to their destinations, not,
necessarily, to make them comfortable on the way. Indeed he had
forgotten the very existence of this one unnoteworthy little passenger.

When he was about to leave the post-office in Maplewood that morning, a
woman had alighted from a wagon, and coming up to him, inquired whether
this were the Riverboro stage, and if he were Mr. Cobb. Being answered
in the affirmative, she nodded to a child who was eagerly waiting for
the answer, and who ran towards her as if she feared to be a moment too
late. The child might have been ten or eleven years old perhaps, but
whatever the number of her summers, she had an air of being small for
her age. Her mother helped her into the stage coach, deposited a bundle
and a bouquet of lilacs beside her, superintended the "roping on"
behind of an old hair trunk, and finally paid the fare, counting out
the silver with great care.

"I want you should take her to my sisters' in Riverboro," she said. "Do
you know Mirandy and Jane Sawyer? They live in the brick house."

Lord bless your soul, he knew 'em as well as if he'd made 'em!

"Well, she's going there, and they're expecting her. Will you keep an
eye on her, please? If she can get out anywhere and get with folks, or
get anybody in to keep her company, she'll do it. Good-by, Rebecca; try
not to get into any mischief, and sit quiet, so you'll look neat an'
nice when you get there. Don't be any trouble to Mr. Cobb.--You see,
she's kind of excited.--We came on the cars from Temperance yesterday,
slept all night at my cousin's, and drove from her house--eight miles
it is--this morning."

"Good-by, mother, don't worry; you know it isn't as if I hadn't
traveled before."

The woman gave a short sardonic laugh and said in an explanatory way to
Mr. Cobb, "She's been to Wareham and stayed over night; that isn't much
to be journey-proud on!"

"It WAS TRAVELING, mother," said the child eagerly and willfully. "It
was leaving the farm, and putting up lunch in a basket, and a little
riding and a little steam cars, and we carried our nightgowns."

"Don't tell the whole village about it, if we did," said the mother,
interrupting the reminiscences of this experienced voyager. "Haven't I
told you before," she whispered, in a last attempt at discipline, "that
you shouldn't talk about night gowns and stockings and--things like
that, in a loud tone of voice, and especially when there's men folks
round?"

"I know, mother, I know, and I won't. All I want to say is"--here Mr.
Cobb gave a cluck, slapped the reins, and the horses started sedately
on their daily task--"all I want to say is that it is a journey
when"--the stage was really under way now and Rebecca had to put her
head out of the window over the door in order to finish her
sentence--"it IS a journey when you carry a nightgown!"

The objectionable word, uttered in a high treble, floated back to the
offended ears of Mrs. Randall, who watched the stage out of sight,
gathered up her packages from the bench at the store door, and stepped
into the wagon that had been standing at the hitching-post. As she
turned the horse's head towards home she rose to her feet for a moment,
and shading her eyes with her hand, looked at a cloud of dust in the
dim distance.

"Mirandy'll have her hands full, I guess," she said to herself; "but I
shouldn't wonder if it would be the making of Rebecca."

All this had been half an hour ago, and the sun, the heat, the dust,
the contemplation of errands to be done in the great metropolis of
Milltown, had lulled Mr. Cobb's never active mind into complete
oblivion as to his promise of keeping an eye on Rebecca.

Suddenly he heard a small voice above the rattle and rumble of the
wheels and the creaking of the harness. At first he thought it was a
cricket, a tree toad, or a bird, but having determined the direction
from which it came, he turned his head over his shoulder and saw a
small shape hanging as far out of the window as safety would allow. A
long black braid of hair swung with the motion of the coach; the child
held her hat in one hand and with the other made ineffectual attempts
to stab the driver with her microscopic sunshade.

"Please let me speak!" she called.

Mr. Cobb drew up the horses obediently.

"Does it cost any more to ride up there with you?" she asked. "It's so
slippery and shiny down here, and the stage is so much too big for me,
that I rattle round in it till I'm'most black and blue. And the
windows are so small I can only see pieces of things, and I've'most
broken my neck stretching round to find out whether my trunk has fallen
off the back. It's my mother's trunk, and she's very choice of it."

Mr. Cobb waited until this flow of conversation, or more properly
speaking this flood of criticism, had ceased, and then said jocularly:--

"You can come up if you want to; there ain't no extry charge to sit
side o' me." Whereupon he helped her out, "boosted" her up to the front
seat, and resumed his own place.

Rebecca sat down carefully, smoothing her dress under her with
painstaking precision, and putting her sunshade under its extended
folds between the driver and herself. This done she pushed back her
hat, pulled up her darned white cotton gloves, and said delightedly:--

"Oh! this is better! This is like traveling! I am a real passenger now,
and down there I felt like our setting hen when we shut her up in a
coop. I hope we have a long, long ways to go?"

"Oh! we've only just started on it," Mr. Cobb responded genially; "it's
more 'n two hours."

"Only two hours," she sighed "That will be half past one; mother will
be at cousin Ann's, the children at home will have had their dinner,
and Hannah cleared all away. I have some lunch, because mother said it
would be a bad beginning to get to the brick house hungry and have aunt
Mirandy have to get me something to eat the first thing.--It's a good
growing day, isn't it?"

"It is, certain; too hot, most. Why don't you put up your parasol?"

She extended her dress still farther over the article in question as
she said, "Oh dear no! I never put it up when the sun shines; pink
fades awfully, you know, and I only carry it to meetin' cloudy Sundays;
sometimes the sun comes out all of a sudden, and I have a dreadful time
covering it up; it's the dearest thing in life to me, but it's an awful
care."

At this moment the thought gradually permeated Mr. Jeremiah Cobb's
slow-moving mind that the bird perched by his side was a bird of very
different feather from those to which he was accustomed in his daily
drives. He put the whip back in its socket, took his foot from the
dashboard, pushed his hat back, blew his quid of tobacco into the road,
and having thus cleared his mental decks for action, he took his first
good look at the passenger, a look which she met with a grave,
childlike stare of friendly curiosity.

The buff calico was faded, but scrupulously clean, and starched within
an inch of its life. From the little standing ruffle at the neck the
child's slender throat rose very brown and thin, and the head looked
small to bear the weight of dark hair that hung in a thick braid to her
waist. She wore an odd little vizored cap of white leghorn, which may
either have been the latest thing in children's hats, or some bit of
ancient finery furbished up for the occasion. It was trimmed with a
twist of buff ribbon and a cluster of black and orange porcupine
quills, which hung or bristled stiffly over one ear, giving her the
quaintest and most unusual appearance. Her face was without color and
sharp in outline. As to features, she must have had the usual number,
though Mr. Cobb's attention never proceeded so far as nose, forehead,
or chin, being caught on the way and held fast by the eyes. Rebecca's
eyes were like faith,--"the substance of things hoped for, the evidence
of things not seen." Under her delicately etched brows they glowed like
two stars, their dancing lights half hidden in lustrous darkness. Their
glance was eager and full of interest, yet never satisfied; their