Read Miracles on Maple Hill (Harcourt Young Classics) for Free Online Page B

warm before.
    "Next year we'll see it again," Marly said.
    "Sure. Mr. Chris will tell us the minute the sap's up," Joe said.
    But when they came sadly out of the sugarhouse, a wonderful thing happened. Just a few feet away, looking at them, stood a deer. It stood absolutely still with its ears and its head up. On its face was the most surprised expression Marly ever saw.
    "Look!" she cried.
    The deer leaped and turned and went off through the trees. It made great leaps without half trying, like a dancer in a ballet. Its white tail went up and down, up and down.
    "Why didn't you just shut up?" Joe demanded. "You scared it off. I saw it as soon as you did; why did you say for
me
to look?"
    "It was so lovely," she said.
    He went marching off ahead as if she should feel ashamed. "Next time I'll just nudge you, Joe," she said. "But I was so excited this time. I'll tell Mr. Chris I saw the first miracle all by myself."
    Then, in a little while, there was Daddy. He heard the car coming and came running down the hill to meet them, laughing and waving his arms.
    "Dale, your own cooking is good for you," Mother said.
    "It's Chrissie's dinners," he said, "and the air." He looked glad to see them, like some of the people you see in railroad stations. He hadn't looked like that at all when he first came home again.
    "Look there," he said, turning around at the door, "look out over that swamp, Lee. See the color? That misty red? Chris says that's spring."
    Before dinner he took them out to see skunk cabbages.
    You'd think something named a skunk cabbage would be ugly and stinky, and Daddy said they sort of were, but they were interesting, too. "Ugly and—" He paused and laughed and said, "Well, you'll see. Ugly and
beautiful.
"
    They were growing out of the ground along a little stream that was flooding down the valley just over Maple Hill behind the house. They had tight, smooth horns thrusting up here and there where the snow had all disappeared. They were green with dark-red designs. "Chris says they're the first real spring, after the sap," Daddy said.
    Chris says ... Chris says ... Marly saw Mother smile when he said it over and over. They all went around the house and the yard to see everything Daddy had done. No trace of dust remained—no mouse-leavings. The steps were mended. Mother said, "Dale, what shining windows! We'll see the sunset tonight." Then she took out the nice red and white curtains she had brought.
    Daddy not only had a fire in the kitchen but in the living room too. The stove in there was called a Franklin, after Benjamin Franklin, who invented it with the help of a mouse—which Marly told Joe right away. (Only Joe said that was just a story in a book and wasn't true in the least.) Anyhow, that stove was like a little fireplace with little carved doors on its front and a nice place on it where you could put your feet to dry. "Oh," Marly sighed, "this is the nicest, prettiest, most comfortable house in the whole world. Can we stay up late? Can we?
Real late?
"
    After supper the Chrises came over. They all sat around. Mr. Chris said he'd "pulled the buckets" in the sugarbush the day before because the buds were coming out on all the trees. "When the sap gets buddy, it's too strong and dark to be good anymore," he said. "Only thing it's good for then is to boil down and sell to factories to put in chewing tobacco. But it's not worth the trouble."
    "This is just like old times when your grandma was here, Lee," Chrissie said. "It's wonderful having your young ones, but I keep looking around for her. I wish we could have the young ones and the old ones, too."
    Mr. Chris shook his head and smiled. "Let the young ones have it now," he said. "If all us old folks stayed around, we'd soon fill the world up, like mice."
    Marly looked at him, quick.
    "Sssh, Chris, don't start the mice again," Mother said.
    But it was for Marly he had said it. She knew what he had meant: There were important things, and then there were things