Cheery and the Chum/Chapter 3
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O you want to take one of them in your hand?" asked Aunt Beth, when the mice had finished the bit of cheese.
"Oh, may I?" cried Cheery; "I'd love to!"
So Aunt Beth reached into the box and softly put her hand over the first Mr. Mouse and lifted him out and put him into Cheery's eager palm.
Cheery laid her other hand over him so that just his little pink nose could poke out between her thumbs, and then she held her hands up to peep at him. "Oh, look!" she cried; "he's in church!"
"In church? What do you mean?" asked Aunt Beth.
"Why, don't you know—And here's the steeple;
Open the doors,
And here's all the people'"—
and she held out her clasped hands, with her forefingers pointed together for the "steeple," and Mr. Mouse poking his nose out from between the front doors.
Aunt Beth touched the tiny pink steeple and the little gold ring on Cheery's finger. "It's a pretty pink and gold church, isn't it?" she said. "Not a bit gloomy and sombre. No wonder he's so contented there."
"Our church is white and gold inside," said Cheery, "and it's so bright and cheerful!—why, it just seems as if the sunshine stays in there all the time and makes everybody all warm and clean. I suppose it is love that makes it seem that way—but somehow love and sunshine always seem a good deal alike to me, don't they to you?"
In her earnestness Cheery opened her hands a little wider than she knew, and suddenly out popped Mr. Mouse, scratching and scrambling along her wrist and up inside of her full white sleeve.
"Oh, oh!" cried Cheery. "Oh, mousie, mousie, your claws are sharp! Oh, Aunt Beth, how will we ever, ever get him out? He's gone clear up to my shoulder!"
"Never mind, dearie," said Aunt Beth; "don't be frightened, I'll attend to him."
"Oh, I'm not frightened," said Cheery. "He won't hurt me any worse there, than as if he were in my hand; but I don't see how we are going to get him out."
"I'll show you," said Aunt Beth, "if you will point to just exactly where he is, without touching him. He is so white that I can't see him through your white waist."
Cheery put her finger gently up to the back of her arm, and Aunt Beth softly laid her hand over the spot and held Mr. Mouse very tenderly, while she unfastened Cheery's waist and turned it back until she could reach the runaway and draw him from his hiding place.
Cheery laughed and shook, her finger at him as Aunt Beth placed him in his box. "Oh, Mr. Mouse, Mr. Mouse," she said, "you are bad—you ran away from church!"
"Perhaps the church wasn't big enough for him," said Aunt Beth.
"I guess it was a pretty tight fit," said Cheery.
"The train's whistled! The train's whistled!" called Uncle Rob from the front door, "and The Chum will be here in twenty minutes."
Cheery dropped the lid of the box and ran through the hall and Uncle Rob caught her and tossed her up onto the railing of the veranda, where she stood on tiptoe craning her neck and trying to see around the bend in the road below the hill. "Oh, dear! I can't see twenty minutes away," she cried, "and waiting takes so long!"
"It surely does," said Uncle Rob, and just then Mr. Cann came up the steps. Mr. Cann was the man who owned the farm and all the chickens and pigs and geese.
"Hello, Cheery-girl!" he exclaimed, catching both of her hands in one of his big ones, "where's The Chum?"
"He's coming, he's coming!" laughed Cheery, dancing so that Uncle Rob could scarcely hold her on the railing. "He's almost here. The carriage must be going by the wild-cherry tree right now, and it will be around the bend in just a minute. Oh, I'm so glad! I'm so glad!"
"Well, I can see why they call you 'Cheery,' all right," said the farmer, laughing; "but what started them to doing it?"
"Oh, my surely name is Charlotte," said Cheery, her eyes still upon the bend in the road; "but when I was little, I used to cry ever so much; I can't remember it, but Mamma says I did; and so, when I would be crying, Mamma would say, 'Come, come, be cheery, be cheery!' and then by and by I got so that when I wanted to cry I'd think about it and I'd say, 'Mamma, I'm cheery, truly I'm cheery,' even while I was crying, and so, because I said, 'I'm cheery,' they got to calling me that, and"
"And you grew to fit it," said Uncle Rob. "Well, I guess it would be pretty hard to be sour or cross, with every one saying and thinking such a happy word whenever they spoke to you or thought of you."
And just then the carriage did come around the bend, and Cheery almost screamed in her excitement when she saw the small figure standing up on the front seat and wildly waving a handkerchief. "It's The Chum! It's The Chum!" she cried over and over again. "Help me down, Uncle Rob, help me down, quick!"
The hill never did seem so long before, nor did the horses ever before climb so slowly, and Cheery stood on the lowest step and nearly tumbled off, in her eagerness.
"The Chum is my cousin," she explained to Mr. Cann, between the frantic wavings of her handkerchief. "He used to be only 'Cousin Robbie'; but just anybody can be cousins, so we decided for him to be my chum instead, and now everybody calls him 'The Chum,' the same as I do. Oh, he's getting out of the carriage at the gate and I can't step off the step. Chum, oh, Chum, can you hear? It's pink and it's white and it's alive, and I didn't put one single foot off the veranda, and it's mice and it got up my sleeve, and Aunt Beth says there's some little turkeys and—oh, you pulled me off the step your own self; but I don't care, 'cause you're here now and it's all right, and let's go and see the pigs right off, quick! Come on, hurry!"