Miracles on Maple Hill (Harcourt Young Classics) Read Free Page A

him.
    Mother said, "You know, Chrissie, I've never been here in sugaring season before? I always wanted to, I remember, and Grandma was always insisting. But we could never get here until school was out."
    "We've had a month of it already," Mr. Chris said. "The best season I've seen in years. Chrissie and I were saying, all of you ought to come to the camp tonight."
    "Mother, let's!" Marly cried. "Joe, there's a little brown house—"
    "I know what a sugar camp is," Joe said.
    "You must eat before you go on to Maple Hill," Chrissie said. "Lee, I sent our man Fritz over to kindle a fire. I thought going in there in the cold—" She looked at Mother with a frown that didn't seem to suit her face at all. "There wasn't much I could do to straighten up, Lee," she said. "If you'd let me know sooner—" She began bustling around the huge warm kitchen, which had a stove twice the size of an ordinary stove and a table ten feet long.
    "I wrote late on purpose so you wouldn't bother," Mother said.
    Marly looked with dismay at the table being set. She slipped close to Mother and whispered, "Do we have to stay and eat here?" She could hardly wait to go on and see Maple Hill.
    "Hush," Mother said, and blushed.
    "Why do we?" Joe whispered. This time he and Marly were on the same side. "All that lunch we brought—"
    Daddy heard. "You two sit down and behave yourselves," he said. "Do as your mother says."
    The whole day would go, just visiting, and they had to leave again tomorrow. As nice as Mr. Chris and Chrissie were, nothing could seem right or finished until they had got to Maple Hill. Getting there had taken weeks of talk and worry already; it was slower than Christmas. Now it was so close—"only a little piece down the road from Chris's" as Mother always said—and they still couldn't see it.
    "I'm not hungry at all. Maybe Joe and me could just—"
    "Now, hush!" Mother said again.
    But Mrs. Chris had heard. She looked at Marly, smiling. "There's not a bit of use you being starved when you get there," she said. "Your mother'll have plenty else to do without worrying about feeding the family the first five minutes."
    Mr. Chris had to get back to the sugar camp to watch his fire. "Mother, can't we go back with him?" Marly asked. That would be second best.
    "Later. Maybe tomorrow," Mother said, and gave Marly a look that said, "What a bother you are..."
    So they watched Mr. Chris go off in the bright chariot, out along the lane and down the road and over the hill, where he disappeared as if he had fallen off the earth.
    "It's wonderful, Joe. Hundreds of trees with buckets hanging around them like charm bracelets. And smoke coming out of the little brown house. It looks like the old witch's house in
Hansel and Gretel.
"
    "I've read all about sugar camps," Joe said. He was still bothered because she'd seen it first, she could tell, and because she had turned out to be the one to come to the rescue.
    "But there's a wonderful
smell,
" she said. "I'll bet you didn't find that in any old book!"
    Actually, eating at Chrissie's was wonderful. When you ate her food, you knew why Mr. Chris had got to be so huge. Mrs. Chris didn't putter around either. Everything was ready in a few minutes because she had expected them. She even knew they were in a big hurry and didn't mind at all.
    "Would you like me to go along, Lee? I might be able to help a little," she said. "We've tried to keep track of the place, but an empty house—I don't know. One thing and another seems to go to pieces. Chris wrote you about somebody breaking in—"
    "Yes," Mother said. "But we don't mind having to work at it. In fact, that's what we want; it's what we came for. Dale's going to stay on there and work while the children finish school."
    "He'd best do some of his eating with us," Mrs. Chris said.
    Daddy started to protest.
    "What's one more to feed?" Mrs. Chris said with a laugh. "You could do with some fattening, Dale. Anything I love to do is fatten a man."
    Daddy's face