The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn Read Free Page A

struggled to get the lid off the tea box, she broke a fingernail, but finally she managed to pry it off. Three spoonfuls went into the pot, and in went the boiling water. They waited for the tea to steep; then Anthony held the strainer as Miss Eells poured it out. It smelled smoky and tasted strange, but Anthony didn’t mind. He just liked the idea of having tea with Miss Eells. It was a warm, friendly thing to do.
    “Now, then,” said Miss Eells as she sipped her tea, “where were we? Oh, yes. A library page has all sorts of duties. He has to take books that have been returned to the library and put them back in their proper places. You’ll have to know something about the Dewey decimal system, but that’s easy enough to learn. Then you’ll have to get books for people, and—”
    Anthony looked puzzled. “How come they can’t go get them themselves?”
    Miss Eells grinned and cocked her head to one side. “Anthony, I know this is hard for you to understand, but most people who come into a library don’t have the faintest idea of how to find a book. They don’t know how to use the card catalog, and they think the Dewey decimal system is something kids learn in arithmetic class. That’s where you come in. You look up the book for them and bring it out to the circulation desk. If you happen to be tending the desk at the time, you stamp the book out for them. Some things, like the back issues of magazines, are kept in a locked room in the basement. If someone wanted one, you would have to go downstairs and get it for them. Then there are all sorts of general tasks, like lighting the fire in the West Reading Room fireplace in the wintertime, and tidying and dusting and things of that sort. Which brings me to something that I feel I have to tell you. If you take the job, you start tomorrow, and tomorrow is the twenty-first of March. Do you know what the twenty-first of March is?”
    “Groundhog Day?”
    Miss Eells glared at Anthony over the top of her glasses. “Groundhog Day indeed! Go to the foot of the class, as my late father used to say. It’s the vernal equinox, the first day of spring! It is also the day when I start the spring cleaning of the library. Do you think you’re ready for that?”
    “Gee, I dunno. What do I have to do?”
    “Oh, not much. You just have to help me polish the woodwork and clean the floors and dust the bric-a-brac and clean the windows and...” Miss Eells stopped talking and burst out laughing when she saw the horrified expression on Anthony’s face. “Oh, Anthony, come on! I’m just kidding! I will have a few extra chores for you to do, but I’m not Simon Legree. You can do what you feel like doing. How about it? Are you interested in the job?”
    Anthony grinned and stuck out his hand. “Put ‘er there, Miss Eells!” he said.
    Miss Eells stuck out her hand, too, and as she did so, she knocked over her cup of tea.
     
     

 
    CHAPTER 2
     
     
    Hoosac, Minnesota, was on the Mississippi River. It was a long, skinny town, shaped like a cigar, with the Mississippi on one side and a long artificial lake called Lake Hoosac on the other. All around the town the land was as flat as a tabletop, but in the distance, on either side, rose tall bluffs. The bluffs were very tall, six or seven hundred feet high, and they were covered with trees. The bluffs on the western side of the town were a long way away, but the ones on the eastern side were quite close. They seemed to tower over the town: Anthony could see them from his bedroom window. Sometimes before he went to bed, he sat in the window and stared at them as they lay shrouded in darkness or glimmering in the moonlight.
    It was funny to think that those bluffs were in Wisconsin. Watching them from his window, Anthony was in Minnesota. The river was the boundary, and it was other things, too—a sort of liquid highway for all sorts of barges and boats. The river traffic was not as important to the town as it had been in the