Emily's Runaway Imagination Read Free Page A

garage and the warehouse full of farm machinery for sale, and turned onto Locust Street at the corner by the blacksmith shop.
    Emily always took pains to speak nicely to the blacksmith since that Friday afternoon at school when her class, which always studied the poets during the last hour of the school week, read The Village Blacksmith by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a poet with a long gray beard like George A. Barbee’s. In the poem were the lines:
    And the muscles of his brawny arms
    Are strong as iron bands.
    After that day any boy who passed the blacksmith shop always yelled:
    â€œAnd the muscles of his scrawny arms
    Are strong as rubber bands.”
    This made Emily feel so sorry for Mr. Wilcox, the blacksmith, that she always spoke to him nicely, in what she hoped was an admiring voice. Mr. Wilcox always seemed glad to see her and once he made her a ring out of a horseshoe nail. This morning she found him working on a plowshare. “Good morning, Mr. Wilcox,” she said through the open door.
    â€œHello there, Emily,” answered Mr. Wilcox. “I see you have your dog Plince with you this fine morning.”
    Even Mr. Wilcox, her good friend Mr. Wilcox, was teasing her. Emily did not know what to say so she said, “Yes…uh, well, I guess I better be going,” and hurried down the road with Prince padding after her.
    When she reached the farm she found her mother hanging out the washing on the lines strung between the tank house and the woodshed. Mama pinched a clothespin over a dish towel on the line. “Well, Emily, did you and Plince have a nice walk?”
    â€œMama!” cried Emily. “How did you know?”
    Mama laughed. “Mrs. Warty Thompson telephoned me about the next meeting of the Ladies’ Civic Club. She told me she ran into Fong Quock on Main Street and he told her. He thought it was a huge joke.”
    â€œI suppose everybody on the line was listening in,” said Emily crossly, because she did not like being laughed at. The Bartlettswere on a five-party telephone line, and Mama was always careful never to say on the telephone anything that she was not willing for the whole town to hear.
    â€œI did hear the sound of some receivers being lifted while I was talking,” said Mama with a smile.
    Emily heaved an exasperated sigh. “Now everybody in the whole world will have to know.”
    Mama shook out a pillowcase and pinned it to the clothesline. “You know how it is in a small town,” she said. “People talk.”
    They certainly did, thought Emily. They talked on Main Street, they talked in Grandpa’s store, they talked on the party line. The trouble was, they did not talk about the right things. She wanted everybody to spread the glad tidings about the library and what did they talk about? Plince. She might as well start calling the dog Plince, becausefrom now on everyone else would.
    And how was she ever going to get to be a bookworm and read Black Beauty like Muriel if people wouldn’t talk about the library?

2
Mama’s Elegant Party
    M ama was so busy and so excited this morning that she burned the toast. Emily was so excited that she did not want to eat toast, especially toast that had been scraped.
    â€œNow Emily,” said Mama, “it is wicked to waste food. Just think of the starving Armenians.”
    Emily would have been delighted to give her toast to one of the starving Armeniansshe had been hearing so much about lately, but since there were no starving Armenians in Pitchfork, she nibbled away at her toast. Scraped toast on the day Mama was having a party, an elegant party! The members of the Ladies’ Civic Club were coming for luncheon— luncheon on a farm where the Bartletts always had dinner at noon.
    Mama was going to steer the conversation around to the subject of a library for Pitchfork. The state library really had answered her letter and had offered to send seventy-five books at a time,