In this place Bessy stopped to turn over a leaf with her thumb, and then went on, first repeating the last words of the first page.
"--Master Tommy actually ate up the real moon out of the sky."
"What! What!" cried Mrs. Goodriche; "ate the moon? Are you sure, Bessy?"
[Illustration: "_'What! What!' cried Mrs. Goodriche._"--Page 305.]
"Yes, it is here," replied Bessy; "the real moon out of the sky--these are the very words."
"Nonsense!" said Mrs. Goodriche; "dear child, you are reading nonsense; don't you perceive it?"
"I don't know," replied Bessy, gaping; "I was not attending--what is it?"
"Don't you know what you have been reading?" asked Mrs. Goodriche.
"To be sure I do," answered Bessy, "or how could I have told the words right?"
"I was not happening," replied Bessy, "just to be thinking about that. I was thinking just then, aunt, of the horrid fright Sukey was in when the bricks came rolling down, and how she did scream."
"Give me the book," said Mrs. Goodriche, almost at the end of her patience; "we will read no more to-day; go up and fetch that unfortunate bombazine frock, it must be darned; you have no other here, or indeed made, but that you have on."
Away ran Bessy, glad to be moving; and when Mrs. Goodriche had looked at the book, she found that Bessy had turned over two leaves,--that Tommy had once eaten a whole pound-cake in a very short time, and that he had cried the whole of the evening for the real moon out of the sky.
It might have been thought, from the time that she was absent, that Bessy had gone to the top of the barn to fetch her frock; the truth is, that it was some time before she could find it; she had thrown it on the drawers when she had taken it off, and it had slipped down behind them, to use an expression of her own. It was all covered over with dust, and the trimming crumpled past recovery; but she gave it a good shaking, and down she came, not in the least troubled at the accident. When she got into the parlour, she found Lucy and Emily seated each with her small task of needlework; their other lessons were finished; and Mrs. Fairchild, too, appeared with her work.
Mrs. Goodriche had desired to hear the story in Emily's new book, and they were each to read four pages at once, then to pass the book; and they had settled to begin with the eldest.