The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation by Annie Fellows Johnston

"O Warwick Hall, dear Warwick Hall, / / Thy happy hours we'll oft recall! / / No time or change can break thy tie, / / Though for awhile we say good-bye / / Good-bye! Good-bye!"

AMID a flutter of handkerchiefs and a babel of parting cries, each / 'bus-load of girls departed from the Hall to the station singing the / farewell song of the school.

A dozen times on the way home Allison, humming it unconsciously, found / the rest of the party joining in. It was an uneventful journey, but a / merry one to the five girls, travelling for the first time without a / chaperon. For the first few hours they had the observation car to / themselves. Even the porter mysteriously disappeared.

"He's curled up asleep somewhere, rest his soul," said Gay, when she had / rung for him several times.

"All the better," answered Kitty. "We don't really need the table, and / it's nice to have him out of the way. This is as good as travelling in / a private car. We can 'stand on our head in our little trundle-bed, and / nobody nigh to hinder.' Oh, girls, I'm so crazy glad that we're on our / way home that I'm positively obliged to do something to let off steam. / I've exhausted my vocabulary trying to express my delight, so there's / nothing left but to howl."

"Or to wriggle," suggested Gay. "Why not try facial expression? How is / this for transcendent joy?"

The grotesque smile which she turned upon them was so ridiculous that / they screamed with laughter.

"Oh, Gay, do stop!" begged Betty. "You're as bad as a comic valentine."

"I'd like to see you do any better," retorted Gay.

"Let's all try," suggested Kitty. "Line up in front of this mirror, / girls. Now all look pleasant, please. Now let your smiles express / rapture. Now, frenzied delight!"

Fascinated by their own ugliness, the five girls stood in a row / distorting their pretty faces with hideous grins and grimaces until they / were weak from laughing. The banging of the car door sent them scuttling / into their seats. A portly old gentleman passed through the car to the / rear platform, and, slamming the door behind him, stood looking down / the rapidly vanishing track. Evidently it was too breezy a view-point / for the old gentleman, even with his coat-collar turned up and hat / pulled down to meet his ears, for in a moment he came in and passed back / to his seat in a forward car. The girls sat demurely looking out of the / windows until he was gone, then they faced each other, giggling.

"Suppose he had caught us making those idiotic faces," exclaimed / Allison. "He would have taken us for a lot of escaped lunatics."

"No, he wouldn't," insisted Gay. "He was a real benevolent-looking old / fellow, the kind that understands young people, and he'd know that it / was just that Christmas has gone to our heads, and made us a little / flighty. I'm sure that his name is James, and that he has six old maid / daughters. He lives out West, and he's taking home a trunk full of / presents for them."

"Let's guess what he has for them," said Kitty. "I'll say that the / oldest one is named Emmaline, and he is taking her a squirrel fur muff."

"And the next one is Agnes Dorothea," said Betty, taking her turn, as if / it were a game. "She's the delicate one of the family, and a sort of / invalid. So he bought her a lavender shoulder shawl that caught his / fatherly eye in a show window, because it was so soft and fluffy. But it / will shrink and fade the first time it is washed till Agnes Dorothea / will look like a homeless cat if she wears it. Still she will persist in / putting it on because dear father brought it to her from Washington."

"He'd certainly think you all were crazy if he could heah yoah / remah'ks," laughed Lloyd.

"Speaking of shawls," cried Gay, "that reminds me of that rainbow shawl / in my bag. I haven't taken a stitch in it since we started, and I / intended to knit all the way home. I simply have to, if I'm to get it / done in time."

Taking out the square of linen in which the fleecy zephyr was wrapped, / she settled herself by the rear window in a big arm-chair, with her feet / drawn up under her, and fell to work with all her might.

"It's so nice and cosy to have the car all to ourselves," sighed / Allison, stretching out luxuriously on the sofa. Betty, bending over her / embroidery, smiled tenderly at a picture that her memory showed her just / then. She was comparing this journey with the first one she had ever / taken. And she saw in her thoughts a little brown-eyed girl of eleven, / setting forth on her first venture into the wide world, with a / sunbonnet tied over her curls, and an old-fashioned covered basket on / her arm. What a dread undertaking that journey had been from the / Cuckoo's Nest to the House Beautiful. She remembered how frightened she / was, and how she had studied the picture of Red Ridinghood, printed in / colours on the border of her handkerchief, until she was afraid to speak / even to the conductor. She saw a possible wolf in every stranger.

Somehow her thoughts kept going back to that time, even in the midst of / Gay's most amusing nonsense, and Kitty's brightest repartee. Even when / Allison began to sing "O Warwick Hall," and she chimed in with the / others, "Dear Warwick Hall," she was not thinking of school, but of the / Cuckoo's Nest, and Davy, and the old weather-beaten meeting-house, in / whose window she had passed so many summer afternoons, reading the musty / dog-eared books she found in the little red bookcase.