Read Little House On The Prairie for Free Online Page A

could not hear Mr. Edwards any more. Only the wind rustled in the prairie grasses. The big, yellow moon was sailing high overhead. The sky was so full of light that not one star twinkled in it, and all the prairie was a shadowy mellowness.
    Then from the woods by the creek a nightingale began to sing.
    Everything was silent, listening to the nightingale's song. The bird sang on and on.
    The cool wind moved over the prairie and the song was round and clear above the grasses'
    whispering. The sky was like a bowl of light overturned on the flat black land.
    The song ended. No one moved or spoke.
    Laura and Mary were quiet, Pa and Ma sat motionless. Only the wind stirred and the grasses sighed. Then Pa lifted the fiddle to his shoulder and softly touched the bow to the strings. A few notes fell like clear drops of water into the stillness. A pause, and Pa began to play the nightingale's song. The nightingale answered him. The nightingale began to sing again. It was singing with Pa's fiddle.
    When the strings were silent, the nightingale went on singing. When it paused, the fiddle called to it and it sang again. The bird and the fiddle were talking to each other in the cool night under the moon.

MOVING IN
    The walls are up,“ Pa was saying to Ma in the morning. ”We'd better move in and get along as best we can without a floor or other fixings. I must build the stable as fast as I can, so Pet and Patty can be inside walls, too. Last night I could hear wolves howling from every direction, seemed like, and close, too."
    “Well, you have your gun, so I'll not worry,”
    said Ma.
    “Yes, and there's Jack. But I'll feel easier in my mind when you and the girls have good solid walls around you.”
    “Why do you suppose we haven't seen any Indians?” Ma asked.
    “Oh, I don't know,” Pa replied, carelessly.
    “I've seen their camping-places among the bluffs. They're away on a hunting-trip now, I guess.”
    Then Ma called: “Girls! The sun's up!” and Laura and Mary scrambled out of bed and into their clothes.
    “Eat your breakfasts quickly,” Ma said, putting the last of the rabbit stew on their tin plates. “We're moving into the house today, and all the chips must be out.”
    So they ate quickly, and hurried to carry all the chips out of the house. They ran back and forth as fast as they could, gathering their skirts full of chips and dumping them in a pile near the fire. But there were still chips on the ground inside the house when Ma began to sweep it with her willow-bough broom.
    Ma limped, though her sprained ankle was beginning to get well. But she soon swept the earthen floor, and then Mary and Laura began to help her carry things into the house.
    Pa was on top of the walls, stretching the 72 canvas wagon-top over the skeleton roof of saplings. The canvas billowed in the wind, Pa's beard blew wildly and his hair stood up from his head as if it were trying to pull itself out. He held on to the canvas and fought it.
    Once it jerked so hard that Laura thought he must let go or sail into the air like a bird. But he held tight to the wall with his legs, and tight to the canvas with his hands, and he tied it down.
    “There!” he said to it. “Stay where you are, and be—”
    “Charles!” Ma said. She stood with her arms full of quilts and looked up at him reprovingly.
    “—and be good,” Pa said to the canvas.
    “Why, Caroline, what did you think I was going to say?”
    “Oh, Charles!” Ma said. “You scalawag!”
    Pa came right down the corner of the house.
    The ends of the logs stuck out, and he used them for a ladder. He ran his hand through his hair so that it stood up even more wildly, and Ma burst out laughing. Then he hugged her, quilts and all.
    Then they looked at the house and Pa said “How's that for a snug house!”
    “I'll be thankful to get into it,” said Ma.
    There was no door and there were no windows. There was no floor except the ground and no roof except the canvas. But that house had