Read "Annabel" by L. Frank Baum online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
It was during this winter, his sixteenth year, when Will entered upon the footing of a successful "business man," that two important adventures befell him.
The first was on one cold Saturday in November just before the snow fell. The gray sky warned the boy that a storm was likely to set in, and as he needed more firewood for the heater he resolved to go into the grove and pick up all the dead branches which the wind had blown from the trees, and to put them in piles so that Nick Wells, the carter, could come for them on Monday morning. So he put some luncheon in his basket and, telling his mother he would not be home for supper, hastened away to the grove, leaving Egbert to care for the fire in the "office".