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_The_ LITTLE COLONEL'S CHRISTMAS VACATION
ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON
THE LITTLE COLONEL'S CHRISTMAS VACATION
Works of ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON The Little Colonel Series
(_Trade Mark, Reg. U.S. Pat. Of._)
Each one vol., large 12mo, cloth, illustrated
The Little Colonel Stories $1.50
(Containing in one volume the three stories, "The
Little Colonel," "The Giant Scissors," and
"Two Little Knights of Kentucky.")
The Little Colonel's House Party 1.50
The Little Colonel's Holidays 1.50
The Little Colonel's Hero 1.50
The Little Colonel at Boarding-School 1.50
The Little Colonel in Arizona 1.50
The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation 1.50
The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor 1.50
The Little Colonel's Knight Comes Riding 1.50
The above 9 vols., _boxed_ 13.50
_In Preparation_--A New Little Colonel Book 1.50
The Little Colonel Good Times Book 1.50
Illustrated Holiday Editions
Each one vol., small quarto, cloth, illustrated, and printed
in colour
The Little Colonel $1.25
The Giant Scissors 1.25
Two Little Knights of Kentucky 1.25
Big Brother 1.25
Cosy Corner Series
Each one vol., thin 12mo, cloth, illustrated
The Little Colonel $.50
The Giant Scissors .50
Two Little Knights of Kentucky .50
Big Brother .50
Ole Mammy's Torment .50
The Story of Dago .50
Cicely .50
Aunt 'Liza's Hero .50
The Quilt that Jack Built .50
Flip's "Islands of Providence" .50
Mildred's Inheritance .50
Other Books
Joel: A Boy of Galilee $1.50
In the Desert of Waiting .50
The Three Weavers .50
Keeping Tryst .50
The Legend of the Bleeding Heart .50
Asa Holmes 1.00
Songs Ysame (Poems, with Albion Fellows Bacon) 1.00
L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
200 Summer Street Boston, Mass.
[Illustration: "'GEE WHIZ!' EXCLAIMED ROB, IN A TEASING TONE, 'SAY THAT
AGAIN, WON'T YOU PLEASE?'" (_See page 163_)]
The Little Colonel's
Christmas Vacation
By ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON
Author of "The Little Colonel Series," "Big Brother,"
"Ole Mammy's Torment," "Joel: A Boy of Galilee,"
"Asa Holmes," etc.
Illustrated by ETHELDRED B. BARRY
BOSTON * L. C. PAGE
& COMPANY * PUBLISHERS
_Copyright, 1905_
By L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
(Incorporated)
_All rights reserved_
Published October, 1905
Ninth Impression, June, 1908
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. WARWICK HALL 1
II. "THE OLD GIRLS' WELCOME TO THE NEW" 22
III. AN EXCURSION 46
IV. "KEEP TRYST" 70
V. A MEMORY-BOOK AND A SOUVENIR SPOON 95
VI. CHRISTMAS CAROLS 121
VII. HOMEWARD BOUND 138
VIII. A PICNIC IN THE SNOW 156
IX. A PROGRESSIVE CHRISTMAS PARTY 176
X. THE DUNGEON OF DISAPPOINTMENT 198
XI. IN THE ATTIC 218
XII. HUMDRUM DAYS 235
XIII. IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF AMANTHIS 254
XIV. "CINDERELLA" 273
XV. A HARD-EARNED PEARL 292
XVI. "SWEET SIXTEEN" 315
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
"'GEE WHIZ!' EXCLAIMED ROB, IN A TEASING TONE.
'SAY THAT AGAIN, WON'T YOU PLEASE?'"
(_See page 163_) _Frontispiece_
"MADAM'S CONVERSATION LED FAR AWAY FROM THE
CREST AND ITS LESSON" 25
"STUDYING THE FACE OF THE HANDSOME YOUNG FELLOW
WITH INTEREST" 105
"'I TELL YOU SOMEBODY WAS TRYING TO SANDBAG ME'" 152
"ONE OF THE BOYS HAD DARED HIM TO CARRY IT" 221
"'I NEARLY FAINTED WHEN I HAPPENED TO LOOK UP'" 248
"SHE RODE OVER TO ROLLINGTON" 299
"'NO MATTAH WHAT LIES AHEAD . . . I'LL NOT
DISAPPOINT THEM'" 333
THE LITTLE COLONEL'S CHRISTMAS VACATION
CHAPTER I.
WARWICK HALL
WARWICK HALL looked more like an old English castle than a modern
boarding-school for girls. Gazing at its high towers and massive portal,
one almost expected to see some velvet-clad page or lady-in-waiting come
down the many flights of marble steps leading between stately terraces
to the river. Even a knight with a gerfalcon on his wrist would not have
seemed out of place, and if a slow-going barge had trailed by between
the willow-fringed banks of the Potomac, it would have seemed more in
keeping with the scene than the steamboats puffing past to Mount Vernon,
with crowds of excursionists on deck.
The gorgeous peacocks strutting along the terraces in the sun were
partly responsible for this impression of mediaeval grandeur. It was for
that very purpose that Madam Chartley, the head of the school, kept the
peacocks. That was one reason, also, that she proudly retained the coat
of arms in the great stained glass window over the stairs, when
circumstances obliged her to turn her ancestral home into a
boarding-school. She thought a sense of mediaeval grandeur was good for
girls, especially young American girls, who are apt to be brought up
without proper respect for age, either of individuals or institutions.
In the dining-room, two long lines of portraits looked down from
opposite walls. One was headed by a grim old earl, and the other by an
equally grim old Pilgrim father of _Mayflower_ fame. The two lines
joined over the fireplace in the portraits of Madam Chartley's
great-grandparents. It was for this great-grandmother, a daughter of the
Pilgrims and a beautiful Washington belle, that Warwick Hall had been
built; for she refused to give up her native land entirely, even for the
son of an earl.
At his death, when the title and the English estates were inherited by a
distant cousin, the only male heir, this place on the Potomac was all
that was left to her and her daughter. It had been closed for two
generations. Now it had come down at last to Madam Chartley. Although
it found her too poor to keep up such an establishment, it also found
her too proud to let her heritage go to strangers, and practical enough
to find some way by which she might retain it comfortably. That way was
to turn it into a first-class boarding-school. She was a graduate of one
of the best American colleges. The patrician standards inherited from
her old world ancestors, combined with the energy and common sense of
the new, made her an ideal woman to undertake the education of young
girls, and Warwick Hall was an ideal place in which to carry out her
wise theories.
The Potomac was red with the glow of the sunset one September evening,
when four girls, on their way back to Washington after a day's
sightseeing, hurried to the upper deck of the steamboat. Some one had
called out that Warwick Hall was in sight. In their haste to reach the
railing, they scarcely noticed a tall girl in blue, already standing
there, who obligingly moved along to make room for them.
She scrutinized them closely, however, for she had seen them in the
cabin a little while before, and their conversation had been so amusing
that she longed to make their acquaintance. Her face brightened
expectantly at their approach, and, as they leaned over the railing, she
studied them with growing interest. The oldest one was near her own age,
she decided after a careful survey, about seventeen; and they were all
particular about the little things that count so much with fastidious
schoolgirls. She approved of each one of them from their broad silk
shoe-laces to the pink tips of their carefully manicured finger-nails.
As the boat swung around a bend in the river, bringing the castle-like
building into full view, a chorus of delighted exclamations broke out
all along the deck. The four girls hung over the railing with eager
faces.
"Look, Lloyd, look!" cried one of them, excitedly. "Peacocks on the
terraces! It's the finishing touch to the picture. We'll feel like Lady
Clare walking down those marble steps. There surely must be a milk-white
doe somewhere in the background."
"Oh, Betty, Betty!" was the laughing answer. "You'll do nothing now but
quote Tennyson and write poetry from mawning till night."
"They're from Kentucky," thought the girl in blue. "I'm sure of it from
the way they talk."
As the boat glided slowly along, Lloyd threw her arm around the girl
beside her, with an impulsive squeeze.
"Kitty Walton," she exclaimed, "aren't you _glad_ that the old
Lloydsboro Seminary burned down? If it hadn't, we wouldn't be on ouah
way now to that heavenly-looking boahding-school!"
The sudden hug loosened Kitty's hat, held insecurely by one pin, and in
another instant the strong breeze would have carried it over into the
river had not the girl in blue caught it as it swept past her. She
handed it back with a friendly smile, glad of an opportunity to speak.
"You are new pupils for Warwick Hall, aren't you?" she asked, when Kitty
had laughingly thanked her. "I hope so, for I'm one of the old girls.
This will be my third year."
"How perfectly lovely!" exclaimed Kitty. "We've been fairly crazy to
meet some one from there. Do tell us if it is as fine as it looks, and
as the catalogue says."
"It is the very nicest place in the world," was the enthusiastic reply.
"There are hardly any rules, and none of them are the kind that rub you
up the wrong way. We don't have to wear uniforms, and we're not marched
out to walk in wholesale lots like prisoners in a chain-gang."
"That's what I used to despise at the Seminary," interrupted Lloyd. "I
always felt like pah't of a circus parade, or an inmate of some asylum,
out for an airing. Keeping in step and keeping in line with a lot of
othahs made a punishment out of the walk, when it would have been such a
pleasuah if we could have skipped along as we pleased. I felt resentful
from the moment the gong rang for us to stah't. It had such a bossy,
tyrannical sawt of sound."
"You'll not find it that way at Warwick Hall," was the emphatic answer.
"There are bells for rising and chapel and meals, but the signal for
exercise is a hunter's horn, blown on the upper terrace. There's
something so breezy and out-of-doors in the sound that it is almost as
irresistible a call as the Pied Piper of Hamelin's. You ought to see the
doors fly open along the corridors, and the girls pour out when that
horn blows. We can go in twos or threes or squads, any way we please,
and in any direction, so long as we keep inside the grounds. There's an
orchard to stroll through, and a wooded hillside, and a big meadow. On
bad days there is over half a mile of gravel road that runs through the
grounds to the trolley station, or we can take our exercise going round
and round the garden walks. The garden is over there at the left of the
Hall," she explained, waving her hand toward it. "Do you see that
pergola stretching along the highest terrace? That is where the garden
begins, and the ivy running over it was started from a slip that Madam
Chartley brought from Sir Walter Scott's home at Abbotsford.
"It is the stateliest old garden you ever saw, and the pride of the
school. There's a sun-dial in it, and hollyhocks from Ann Hathaway's
cottage, and rhododendrons from Killarney. There's all the flowers
mentioned in the old songs. Madam has brought slips and roots and seeds
from all sorts of places, so that nearly every plant is connected with
some noted place or person. I simply love it. In warm weather I get up
early in the morning, and study my Latin out in the honeysuckle arbour.
Latin is my hardest study, but it doesn't seem half so hard out there
among the bees and hummingbirds, where it's all so sweet and still."
"Oh, will they let you do things like that?" came the same amazed
question from all four at once.
"You wait and see," was the encouraging reply. "That isn't the
beginning."
The four exchanged ecstatic glances.
"Oh, we haven't introduced ourselves," exclaimed Kitty, bethinking
herself of formalities. "I am Katherine Walton, and this is my big
sister, Allison. That is Lloyd Sherman and Elizabeth Lewis. They're
almost as good as sisters, for they live together, and Lloyd's mother is
Betty's godmother. And we're all from the same place, Lloydsboro Valley,
Kentucky."
"And I am Juliet Lynn from Wisconsin. That is, I lived there till papa
had to come to Washington. He's a Congressman now. I was sure that you
were from Kentucky, and I've been hoping that you were new girls for the
Hall ever since I heard you talking about some house-party where you all
did such funny things."
"Oh, yes, that was one we had this summer at The Beeches," began Kitty,
glibly, "when we all took turns--"
But, with a big-sister frown of warning, Allison said, in a low aside:
"For pity's sake, don't stop to tell all that long rigmarole over _now_.
We want to hear some more about the school."
"What is Madam Chartley herself like?" she asked, turning to Juliet.
"She must be something of an old dragon if she can keep forty girls
straight with so few rules. We've pictured her as a big British
matron, dignified and imposing,--a sort of lioness rampant, you know,
with a stern air, as if she was about to say in a deep voice,
'England--expects--every--man--to--do--his--duty,--sir!'"
"But she isn't that way at all!" cried Juliet, almost indignantly.
"She's just as American as you are, for she was born and educated in
this country. She has the gentlest voice and sweetest manner. Her hair
is snow-white, and there's something awfully aristocratic about her, for
she is--sort of--well, I hardly know how to express it, but just what
you'd expect the 'daughter of a hundred earls' to be, you know. But you
won't feel one bit in awe of her. The girls simply adore her."
"But isn't she something to be afraid of when you break the rules?"
queried Kitty, anxiously. "When you have midnight feasts and pillow-case
prowls and all that?"
Juliet shook her head. "We don't do those things. I tell you it isn't
like any other boarding-school you ever heard of."
"Then I know I sha'n't like it," declared Kitty. "All my life I've
looked forward to going off to school just for the jolly good times I'd
have. You see we were only day-pupils at Lloydsboro Seminary, and there
wasn't a chance for that kind of fun, except the one term when Lloyd and
Betty boarded in the school while their family was away from home. We
managed to stir up a little excitement then, and I'd hoped for all sorts
of thrilling adventures here. I'm horribly disappointed that it's so
tame and goody-goody."
Juliet's face coloured resentfully. "It isn't tame at all!" she
declared. "It's only that we are always so busy doing pleasant things
and going to interesting places that nobody cares for stolen spreads.
Some girls don't like the place just at first, because it's so different
from what they've been used to. But by the end of the term they're so in
love with Warwick Hall and everything about it that nothing could induce
them to change schools. There's only one girl I ever heard of who didn't
like it."
"And why didn't she?" asked Lloyd and Allison, in the same breath.
"Well, she came from some ranch away out West, Wyoming or Nevada or some
of those places, where she'd been as free and easy as a squaw, and she
couldn't stand so much civilization. You see, from the minute you enter
Warwick Hall you feel somehow that you're a guest of Madam Chartley's
instead of a pupil. She uses the old family silver and the china has her
great-grandfather's crest on it, and she brought over a London butler
who grew up in the family service. She keeps him for the same reason
that she keeps the peacocks, I suppose. They give such a grand air to
the place.
"Lida Wilsy--that's the girl from the ranch--couldn't live up to so much
stateliness, especially of the stony-eyed butler. Hawkins was too much
for her. She told her roommate that she thought it was foolish to have
so many forks and spoons at each place. One was enough for anybody to
get through a dinner with. Life was too short for so much fuss and
feathers. She never could learn which to use first, and she would get
her silverware so hopelessly mixed up that by the time dessert was
brought on maybe she would have nothing to eat it with but an oyster
fork. I've seen her ready to go under the table from embarrassment. Not
that she cared so much what the girls thought. She joked about it to
them. Her father owned the biggest part of a silver mine, and they could
have had Tiffany's whole stock of forks if they'd wanted them. It was
Hawkins she was afraid of. Of course he was too well trained to show
what he thought of her mistakes, but you couldn't help feeling his high
and mighty inward scorn of such ignorance. It fairly oozed from his
finger-tips."
Kitty's black eyes sparkled, anticipating times ahead when she would
certainly make it lively for Hawkins.
"There's grandfathah!" cried Lloyd, catching sight of a white-haired old
gentleman who had just come up on deck. "I want to tell him about the
garden before we lose sight of it."
Juliet's glance followed her with interest as she darted away, for it
was a distinguished-looking old gentleman who lifted his hat with
elaborate courtesy at her approach. He was dressed in white duck, and
the right coat-sleeve hung empty.
"It's Colonel Lloyd," explained Allison, noting Juliet's glance of
curiosity. "He's bringing us all to school, for it wasn't convenient for
mother or Mrs. Sherman to come."
"They don't look alike," remarked Juliet, surveying them with a puzzled
expression. "But what is it about them--there is such a startling
resemblance?"
"Everybody notices it," said Kitty. "When Lloyd was smaller, they used
to call her the Little Colonel all the time, but especially when she was
in a temper. They call her Princess now."
"Princess," echoed Juliet. "That name suits her exactly."
She cast another admiring glance at the slender, fair-haired girl,
standing with her hand in her grandfather's arm, pointing out the
beauties of the place they were slowly passing.
"And she will suit Warwick Hall," she added, with a sudden burst
of schoolgirl enthusiasm, "just as the peacocks suit it, and the
coat of arms, and Madam Chartley herself. She's got that same
'daughter-of-a-hundred-earls' air about her that Madam has."
"Oh, it all sounds so delightful and fascinating," sighed Betty, pushing
back the brown hair that blew in little curls about her face, and
smiling at the slowly disappearing Hall with a happy light in her brown
eyes. "I can hardly wait for to-morrow."
The boat had glided on until only the high, square tower was left in
view, with the red sunset glow upon it.
"'The splendour falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story'"--
Betty sang half under her breath, with a farewell flutter of her
handkerchief, as the boat rounded a bend in the river which hid the
tower from sight. Already she was in love with the place, and already,
as Lloyd had predicted, she was fitting some line of Tennyson to it at
every turn.
Acquaintance progressed rapidly in the next half-hour. Long before they
reached Washington, Juliet knew, not only that she had guessed Allison's
age correctly at seventeen, that Betty was sixteen, and Lloyd and Kitty
a year younger, but that each girl in her own way would make a desirable
friend. Incidentally she learned that Allison and Kitty had lived in the
Philippines, and were daughters of the brave General Walton who had lost
his life there in his country's service. When they parted at the
boat-landing, it was with delightful anticipations of the next day, and
with each one eager to renew an acquaintance so pleasantly begun.
* * * * *
If Warwick Hall suggested ancient stateliness on the outside, it was
informal and frivolous enough within, when forty girls were taking
possession of their rooms on the opening day of the school year. In and
out like a flock of twittering sparrows, the old pupils darted from one
room to another, exchanging calls and greetings, laughing over old jokes
and reminiscences, and settling down into familiar corners with an ease
that the new girls envied.
Juliet Lynn, quickly establishing herself in her last year's quarters,
started down the corridor to announce at every door that she was the
first one unpacked and settled. All the other rooms were in hopeless
confusion, beds, chairs, and floors being piled with the contents of
open trunks.
At the first door where she paused, a shower of shoes and slippers was
the only answer to her triumphant announcement. At the next a laughing
cry of "Help! help!" greeted her. At the third she was informed that
there was standing-room only.
"Don't you believe it, Juliet!" called a gay voice from the chiffonier,
where an earlier visitor was perched. "There's always room at the top.
I've discovered where Min keeps her butter-scotch. Come in and have
some."
"No, I'm going the rounds to see what everybody is about," she answered.
"You're all in such a mess now, I'd rather look in later. I'm one of the
early settlers, and have been in order for ages."
"What's the odds so long as you're happy?" called the girl on the
chiffonier. "Besides, it's no better next door. They'll invite you to
make yourself at home under the bed, as they did me. Come on back and
tell us your summer's experiences. Min has had one dizzy whirl of
adventures after another."
But Juliet kept on down the hall. She wanted to find what rooms had been
assigned to the girls whom she had met the day before on the boat, and
to hear their first impressions of Warwick Hall. Presently, through a
half-open door, she caught sight of Betty, sitting at an open window
overlooking the river. With chin in hand and elbows resting on the sill,
she was gazing dreamily out at the willow-fringed banks, so absorbed in
her thoughts that she did not hear Juliet's first knock. But at the
second she started up and called cordially: "Oh, I'm so glad to see you!
Come in!"
"Why, you're all unpacked and put away, too!" exclaimed Juliet, in
surprise, looking around the orderly room. "I thought that I was the
only one, but I see you've even hung your pictures."
"Yes, we don't know any of the other girls yet, so we didn't lose any
time running back and forth to their rooms, as everybody else is doing.
We've been through ever so long. Lloyd is out exploring the grounds
with Allison, but I was too tired after all the sightseeing we have
done. I'd be glad not to stir out of my room for a week."
She pushed a rocking-chair hospitably toward her guest, and leaned back
in the opposite one.
"I don't want to sit down," said Juliet. "I'm just exploring. I think
it's so much fun to poke around the first day and see how everybody is
fixed. You don't mind, do you, if I walk around and look at your
pictures?"
"No, indeed!" answered Betty, cordially. "Help yourself."
Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she sat up straight in her
chair, and adjusted the side-combs which were slipping out of her curly
hair. It was a pleasing reflection that the mirror showed her, of a slim
girl in a linen shirt-waist and a dark brown skirt just reaching to her
ankles. But it held her gaze only long enough for her to see that her
belt was properly pulled down and her stock all that could be desired.
The friendly brown eyes and the trusting little mouth never needed
readjustment. They always met the world with a smile, and thus far the
world had always smiled back at them.
"Last year," said Juliet, as she wandered around, "the girl who had this
room simply plastered the walls with posters. It was so sporty-looking.
She had hunting scenes between these windows, and there was a frieze of
hounds and a yard of puppies where you have that panel of photographs.
Oh, what perfectly beautiful places!" she cried, moving nearer. "Do tell
me about them. Is that where you live?"
"Yes, this is our Lloydsboro Valley corner--the Happy Valley we call
it," answered Betty, crossing the room to point out the various places:
"Locust," her home and Lloyd's, a stately white-pillared mansion at the
end of a long locust avenue; "The Beeches," where the Waltons lived; the
vine-covered stone church; the old mill; the post-office, and a row of
snap shots showing Lloyd and her mounted on their ponies, Tarbaby and
Lad.
"What good times you must have there!" sighed Juliet, presently.
Betty opened a drawer in the writing-desk and took out six little books,
bound in white kid, her initials stamped in gold on each cover.
"Just see how many!" she exclaimed. "I started to keep a record of all
my good times when I went to Lloyd's first house-party. When godmother
gave me this volume, number one, I thought it would take a lifetime to
fill it, but so many lovely things happened that summer that it was
full in a little while. Then I went abroad in the fall, and that trip
filled a volume. Now I am beginning the seventh."
Juliet stared at the pile of white books in amazement. "What a lot of
work!" she cried. "Doesn't it take every bit of pleasure out of your
good times, thinking that you'll have to write all about it afterward? I
tried to keep a diary once, but it looked more like the report of a
weather bureau than anything else, and my small brother got hold of it
and mortified me nearly to death one night when we had company, by
quoting something from it. It sounded dreadfully sentimental, although
it hadn't seemed so when I wrote it. That's the trouble in keeping a
journal, don't you think so? You'll often put down something that seems
important at the time, but that sounds silly afterward."
"No," said Betty, hesitatingly. "I always enjoy going back to read the
first volumes. It's interesting to see how one changes from year to year
in opinions as well as handwriting. See how little and cramped the
letters are in this first volume. It's good exercise, and, as I expect
to write a book some day, every bit of practice helps."
Betty made the announcement as simply as if she had said she intended
to darn a stocking some day, and Juliet looked at her in open-mouthed
wonder. She had never encountered a girl of that species before, and
more than ever she felt that her friendship would be worth cultivating.
When she finally took her departure, there was no time for any further
tour of inspection, but she ran into several rooms on the way back to
her own to say, hastily: "Girls, do all you can to get that Kentucky
quartette into our sorority! I'll tell you about them later. We must
give them a grand rush to-morrow night at the old girls' welcome to the
new. I hope I'll get to take Elizabeth Lewis. My _dears_, she's a
perfect genius! She's written poems and plays that have been published,
and she's at work on a _book_!"
As Juliet closed the door behind her, Betty took up the new volume in
the series of little white records, and began turning the blank pages.
Like the new school year, it lay spread out before her, white and fair,
hers to write therein as she chose.
"And I'll try my hardest to make it the best and happiest record of them
all," she said to herself. As she dipped her pen into the ink, there was
a knock at the door, and a white-capped maid looked in.
"Madam Chartley would be pleased to see you at once in the pink room,
miss," she announced, and Betty, much surprised, rose to answer the
unexpected summons.