Mary Cary: "Frequently Martha" (Electronic book text)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1910 edition. Excerpt: ...than a lamp-post, and you couldn't make me cry. But when any one is good to me, I haven't a bit of firmness, and am no better than a caterpillar. I got thirty-one presents this year. Thirtyone I didn't know I had so many friends in Yorkburg, and my heart was so bursting with surprise and gratitude it just ached. Ached happy. We are not often allowed to make regular visits, but I have lots of little talks informal on errands, or messages, or passing; and as I know almost everybody by sight, I have a right large speaking acquaintance. With some people, Miss Katherine says, that's the safest kind to have. You see, Yorkburg is a very small place. Just three long streets and some short ones going across. Scratching up everything, it hasn't got three thousand people in it. A lot of them are colored. But it's very old and historic. Awful old; so is everything in it. As for its blue blood, Mrs. Hunt says there's more in Yorkburg than any place of its size in America. Most of the strangers who come here, though, seem to prefer to pass on rather than stop, and Miss Webb thinks it's on account of the blood. A little red mixed in might wake Yorkburg up, she says, and that's what it needs--to know the war is over and the change has come to stay. But I love Yorkburg, and most of the people are dear. Some queer. Old Mrs. Peet is. Her husband has been dead forty years, but she still keeps his hat on the rack for protection, and whenever any one goes to see her after dark she always calls him, as if he were upstairs. She lives by herself and is over seventy, and she's pretended so long that he's living that they say she really believes he is. She almost makes you believe it, too. Miss Bray sent me there one night. She wanted some cherry-bounce for Eliza Green, ...