Whenever there's a rainy day They send us to the barn to play From after lunch till supper-time. And there they let us run and climb And tumble in the hay and straw-- Such funny tricks you never saw! We overhaul the piles of junk, We open every battered trunk, And every corner we explore As if we'd never searched before; We play at burglars or at thieves, And crawl along beneath the eaves, Or else we are a garrison Besieged, outnumbered ten to one, And from the windows we repel The foe that hides beyond the well. And sometimes, if there's no one by (If John has gone down to the sty Or to the pasture for the cow, Or--if John's absent, anyhow), We take old Dobbin from the stall-- Which we ought never do at all-- And play at circus, while the horse Plods around a ring, of course, With one of us upon his back; Another makes the long whip crack; A third--the lucky one--is clown; And all the girls have to sit down On seats that have been put about, And they must clap their hands and shout. Oh, circus is the greatest fun! When John goes out, it's always done.
Tilly Coombs watched the sled as it went crunching and jingling up the hill, and then entered her house, with a long sigh that the party was over.
"I'm getting to have good times; they treat me 'most as if I was other folks," she said to herself, happily. She would have liked to tell her mother about the good time, but her father had come home. She heard his querulous voice, and knew that he had been drinking just enough to make it unsafe to disturb him; so she crept softly up to her room--a cold and bare nook under the eaves. She pulled off her ravelled mitten and gazed at it ruefully. "That was an awful queer thing to do!" she said to herself aloud. "And, my! wa'n't it cold in that barn? But nobody saw me--not a soul! Nobody will ever know! The worst of it is, if I had been ketched, then nobody would ever believe that Alf wasn't a thief! An awful queer thing!" For a minute or two Tilly was lost in painful and perplexing reflection. Then she suddenly shook her fist fiercely at her small, crooked reflection in the cracked piece of looking-glass upon the wall. "Tilly Coombs, don't you never darst to think, as long as you live, that anything _she_ did was queer!" she said, in an impressive whisper that echoed from all the empty corners of the dreary little room. And then Tilly tucked a ravelled mitten under the ragged ticking of her bed, and slept in peace.