CHAPTER I.

THE GIANT SCISSORS

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. IN THE PEAR-TREE.

II. A NEW FAIRY TALE.

III. BEHIND THE GREAT GATE.

IV. A LETTER AND A MEETING.

V. A THANKSGIVING BARBECUE.

VI. JOYCE PLAYS GHOST.

VII. OLD "NUMBER THIRTY-ONE".

VIII. CHRISTMAS PLANS AND AN ACCIDENT.

IX. A GREAT DISCOVERY.

X. CHRISTMAS.

[Illustration: JULES]

THE GATE OF THE GIANT

SCISSORS.

CHAPTER I.

IN THE PEAR-TREE.

Joyce was crying, up in old Monsieur Gréville's tallest pear-tree. She

had gone down to the farthest corner of the garden, out of sight of the

house, for she did not want any one to know that she was miserable

enough to cry.

She was tired of the garden with the high stone wall around it, that

made her feel like a prisoner; she was tired of French verbs and foreign

faces; she was tired of France, and so homesick for her mother and Jack

and Holland and the baby, that she couldn't help crying. No wonder, for

she was only twelve years old, and she had never been out of the little

Western village where she was born, until the day she started abroad

with her Cousin Kate.

Now she sat perched up on a limb in a dismal bunch, her chin in her

hands and her elbows on her knees. It was a gray afternoon in November;

the air was frosty, although the laurel-bushes in the garden were all

in bloom.

"I s'pect there is snow on the ground at home," thought Joyce, "and

there's a big, cheerful fire in the sitting-room grate.

"Holland and the baby are shelling corn, and Mary is popping it. Dear

me! I can smell it just as plain! Jack will be coming in from the

post-office pretty soon, and maybe he'll have one of my letters. Mother

will read it out loud, and there they'll all be, thinking that I am

having such a fine time; that it is such a grand thing for me to be

abroad studying, and having dinner served at night in so many courses,

and all that sort of thing. They don't know that I am sitting up here in

this pear-tree, lonesome enough to die. Oh, if I could only go back home

and see them for even five minutes," she sobbed, "but I can't! I can't!

There's a whole wide ocean between us!"

She shut her eyes, and leaned back against the tree as that desolate

feeling of homesickness settled over her like a great miserable ache.

Then she found that shutting her eyes, and thinking very hard about the

little brown house at home, seemed to bring it into plain sight. It was

like opening a book, and seeing picture after picture as she turned

the pages.

There they were in the kitchen, washing dishes, she and Mary; and Mary

was standing on a soap-box to make her tall enough to handle the dishes

easily. How her funny little braid of yellow hair bobbed up and down as

she worked, and how her dear little freckled face beamed, as they told

stories to each other to make the work seem easier.

Mary's stories all began the same way: "If I had a witch with a wand,

this is what we would do." The witch with a wand had come to Joyce in

the shape of Cousin Kate Ware, and that coming was one of the pictures

that Joyce could see now, as she thought about it with her eyes closed.

There was Holland swinging on the gate, waiting for her to come home

from school, and trying to tell her by excited gestures, long before she

was within speaking distance, that some one was in the parlor. The baby

had on his best plaid kilt and new tie, and the tired little mother was

sitting talking in the parlor, an unusual thing for her. Joyce could see

herself going up the path, swinging her sun-bonnet by the strings and

taking hurried little bites of a big June apple in order to finish it

before going into the house. Now she was sitting on the sofa beside

Cousin Kate, feeling very awkward and shy with her little brown fingers

clasped in this stranger's soft white hand. She had heard that Cousin

Kate was a very rich old maid, who had spent years abroad, studying

music and languages, and she had expected to see a stout, homely woman

with bushy eyebrows, like Miss Teckla Schaum, who played the church

organ, and taught German in the High School.

But Cousin Kate was altogether unlike Miss Teckla. She was tall and

slender, she was young-looking and pretty, and there was a stylish air

about her, from the waves of her soft golden brown hair to the bottom of

her tailor-made gown, that was not often seen in this little

Western village.

Joyce saw herself glancing admiringly at Cousin Kate, and then pulling

down her dress as far as possible, painfully conscious that her shoes

were untied, and white with dust. The next picture was several days

later. She and Jack were playing mumble-peg outside under the window by

the lilac-bushes, and the little mother was just inside the door,

bending over a pile of photographs that Cousin Kate had dropped in her

lap. Cousin Kate was saying, "This beautiful old French villa is where I

expect to spend the winter, Aunt Emily. These are views of Tours, the

town that lies across the river Loire from it, and these are some of the

châteaux near by that I intend to visit. They say the purest French in

the world is spoken there. I have prevailed on one of the dearest old

ladies that ever lived to give me rooms with her. She and her husband

live all alone in this big country place, so I shall have to provide

against loneliness by taking my company with me. Will you let me have

Joyce for a year?"

Jack and she stopped playing in sheer astonishment, while Cousin Kate

went on to explain how many advantages she could give the little girl to

whom she had taken such a strong fancy.

Looking through the lilac-bushes, Joyce could see her mother wipe her

eyes and say, "It seems like pure providence, Kate, and I can't stand in

the child's way. She'll have to support herself soon, and ought to be

prepared for it; but she's the oldest of the five, you know, and she has

been like my right hand ever since her father died. There'll not be a

minute while she is gone, that I shall not miss her and wish her back.

She's the life and sunshine of the whole home."

Then Joyce could see the little brown house turned all topsy-turvy in

the whirl of preparation that followed, and the next thing, she was

standing on the platform at the station, with her new steamer trunk

beside her. Half the town was there to bid her good-by. In the

excitement of finding herself a person of such importance she forgot how

much she was leaving behind her, until looking up, she saw a tender,

wistful smile on her mother's face, sadder than any tears.

[Illustration: WHERE JOYCE LIVED]

Luckily the locomotive whistled just then, and the novelty of getting

aboard a train for the first time, helped her to be brave at the

parting. She stood on the rear platform of the last car, waving her

handkerchief to the group at the station as long as it was in sight, so

that the last glimpse her mother should have of her, was with her bright

little face all ashine.

All these pictures passed so rapidly through Joyce's mind, that she had

retraced the experiences of the last three months in as many minutes.

Then, somehow, she felt better. The tears had washed away the ache in

her throat. She wiped her eyes and climbed liked a squirrel to the

highest limb that could bear her weight.

This was not the first time that the old pear-tree had been shaken by

Joyce's grief, and it knew that her spells of homesickness always ended

in this way. There she sat, swinging her plump legs back and forth, her

long light hair blowing over the shoulders of her blue jacket, and her

saucy little mouth puckered into a soft whistle. She could see over the

high wall now. The sun was going down behind the tall Lombardy poplars

that lined the road, and in a distant field two peasants still at work

reminded her of the picture of "The Angelus." They seemed like

acquaintances on account of the resemblance, for there was a copy of the

picture in her little bedroom at home.

All around her stretched quiet fields, sloping down to the ancient

village of St. Symphorien and the river Loire. Just across the river, so

near that she could hear the ringing of the cathedral bell, lay the

famous old town of Tours. There was something in these country sights

and sounds that soothed her with their homely cheerfulness. The crowing

of a rooster and the barking of a dog fell on her ear like

familiar music.

"It's a comfort to hear something speak English," she sighed, "even if

it's nothing but a chicken. I do wish that Cousin Kate wouldn't be so

particular about my using French all day long. The one little half-hour

at bedtime when she allows me to speak English isn't a drop in the

bucket. It's a mercy that I had studied French some before I came, or I

would have a lonesome time. I wouldn't be able to ever talk at all."

It was getting cold up in the pear-tree. Joyce shivered and stepped down

to the limb below, but paused in her descent to watch a peddler going

down the road with a pack on his back.

"Oh, he is stopping at the gate with the big scissors!" she cried, so

interested that she spoke aloud. "I must wait to see if it opens."

There was something mysterious about that gate across the road. Like

Monsieur Gréville's, it was plain and solid, reaching as high as the

wall. Only the lime-trees and the second story windows of the house

could be seen above it. On the top it bore an iron medallion, on which

was fastened a huge pair of scissors. There was a smaller pair on each

gable of the house, also.

During the three months that Joyce had been in Monsieur Gréville's

home, she had watched every day to see it open; but if any one ever

entered or left the place, it was certainly by some other way than this

queer gate.

What lay beyond it, no one could tell. She had questioned Gabriel the

coachman, and Berthé the maid, in vain. Madame Gréville said that she

remembered having heard, when a child, that the man who built it was

named _Ciseaux_, and that was why the symbol of this name was hung over

the gate and on the gables. He had been regarded as half crazy by his

neighbors. The place was still owned by a descendant of his, who had

gone to Algiers, and left it in charge of two servants.

The peddler rang the bell of the gate several times, but failing to

arouse any one, shouldered his pack and went off grumbling. Then Joyce

climbed down and walked slowly up the gravelled path to the house.

Cousin Kate had just come back from Tours in the pony cart, and was

waiting in the door to see if Gabriel had all the bundles that she had

brought out with her.

Joyce followed her admiringly into the house. She wished that she could

grow up to look exactly like Cousin Kate, and wondered if she would

ever wear such stylish silk-lined skirts, and catch them up in such an

airy, graceful way when she ran up-stairs; and if she would ever have a

Paris hat with long black feathers, and always wear a bunch of sweet

violets on her coat.

She looked at herself in Cousin Kate's mirror as she passed it, and

sighed. "Well, I am better-looking than when I left home," she thought.

"That's one comfort. My face isn't freckled now, and my hair is more

becoming this way than in tight little pigtails, the way I used to

wear it."

Cousin Kate, coming up behind her, looked over her head and smiled at

the attractive reflection of Joyce's rosy cheeks and straightforward

gray eyes. Then she stopped suddenly and put her arms around her,

saying, "What's the matter, dear? You have been crying."

"Nothing," answered Joyce, but there was a quaver in her voice, and she

turned her head aside. Cousin Kate put her hand under the resolute

little chin, and tilted it until she could look into the eyes that

dropped under her gaze "You have been crying," she said again, this

time in English, "crying because you are homesick. I wonder if it would

not be a good occupation for you to open all the bundles that I got this

afternoon. There is a saucepan in one, and a big spoon in the other, and

all sorts of good things in the others, so that we can make some

molasses candy here in my room, over the open fire. While it cooks you

can curl up in the big armchair and listen to a fairy tale in the

firelight. Would you like that, little one?"

"Oh, yes!" cried Joyce, ecstatically. "That's what they are doing at

home this minute, I am sure. We always make candy every afternoon in the

winter time."

Presently the saucepan was sitting on the coals, and Joyce's little pug

nose was rapturously sniffing the odor of bubbling molasses. "I know

what I'd like the story to be about," she said, as she stirred the

delicious mixture with the new spoon. "Make up something about the big

gate across the road, with the scissors on it."

Cousin Kate crossed the room, and sat down by the window, where she

could look out and see the top of it.

"Let me think for a few minutes," she said. "I have been very much

interested in that old gate myself."

She thought so long that the candy was done before she was ready to tell

the story; but while it cooled in plates outside on the window-sill, she

drew Joyce to a seat beside her in the chimney-corner. With her feet on

the fender, and the child's head on her shoulder, she began this story,

and the firelight dancing on the walls, showed a smile on Joyce's

contented little face.