Little Town On The Prairie Read Free

picked up every nail that Pa dropped by mistake. Even Ma often spent minutes in idleness, looking on. It was exciting to see the shanty being made into a house.
    When it was done, they had three rooms. The new part was two tiny bedrooms, each with a window.
    Now the beds would not be in the front room any more.
    “Here's where we kill two birds with one stone,”
    said Ma. “We'll combine spring housecleaning and moving.”
    The y washed the window curtains and all the quilts and hung them out to dry. The n they washed the new windows till they shone, and hung on them new curtains made of old sheets and beautifully hemmed with Mary's tiny stitches. Ma and Laura set up the bedsteads in the new rooms all made of fresh, clean-smelling boards. Laura and Carrie filled the straw ticks with the brightest hay from the middle of a haystack, and they made up the beds with sheets still warm from Ma's ironing and with the clean quilts smelling of the prairie air.
    Then Ma and Laura scrubbed and scoured every inch of the old shanty, that was now the front room. It was spacious now, with no beds in it, only the cookstove and cupboards and table and chairs and the whatnot. When it was perfectly clean, and everything in place, they all stood and admired it.
    “You needn't see it for me, Laura,” Mary said. “I can feel how large and fresh and pretty it is.”
    The fresh, starched white curtains moved softly in the wind at the open window. The scrubbed board walls and the floor were a soft yellow-gray. A bouquet of grass flowers and windflowers that Carrie had picked and put in the blue bowl on the table, seemed to bring springtime in. In the corner the varnished brown whatnot stood stylish and handsome.
    The afternoon light made plain the gilded titles of the books on the whatnot's lower shelf, and glittered in the three glass boxes on the shelf above, each with tiny flowers painted on it. Above them, on the next shelf, the gilt flowers shone on the glass face of the clock and its brass pendulum glinted, swinging to and fro. Higher still, on the very top shelf, was Laura's white china jewel box with the wee gold cup and saucer on its lid, and beside it, watching over it, sat Carrie's brown and white china dog.
    On the wall between the doors of the new bedrooms, Ma hung the wooden bracket that Pa had carved for her Christmas present, long ago in the Big Woods of Wisconsin. Every little flower and leaf, the small vine on the edge of the little shelf, and the larger vines climbing to the large star at the top, were still as perfect as when he had carved them with his jack-knife. Older still, older than Laura could remember, Ma's china shepherdess stood pink and white and smiling on the shelf.
    It was a beautiful room.

THE NECESSARY CAT
    Now the first yellow-green spears of corn were dotted like fluttering ribbon-ends along the furrows of broken sod. One evening Pa walked across the field to look at them. He came back tired and exasperated.
    “I've got to replant more than half the cornfield,” he said.
    “Oh, Pa. Why?” Laura asked.
    “Gophers,” said Pa. “Well, this is what a man gets for putting in the first corn in a new country.”
    Grace was hugging his legs. He picked her up and tickled her cheek with his beard to make her laugh.
    She remembered the planting rhyme, and sitting on his knee she chanted it proudly
    "One for the blackbird,
    One for the crow,
    And that will leave
    Just two to grow."
    “ The man that made that up was an Easterner,” Pa told her. "Out here in the Territory we'll have to make our own rhyme, Grace. How's this for a try?
    "One for a gopher,
    Two for a gopher,
    Three for a gopher,
    Four don't go fur."
    “Oh, Charles,” Ma protested, laughing. She did not think puns were funny, but she could not help laughing at the naughty look Pa gave her when he made one.
    He had no sooner planted the seed corn than the striped gophers found it. All over the field they had been scampering, and stopping to dig into