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THE COUNTRY BOY
23

have any one to hunt eggs, and no one to go with me to dig dandelion greens; and we won’t see any boy riding the old red bull to the State Fair again, will we, Grandma?” Then they both broke down and cried. “But I’ll come up and gather the eggs for you, it’s only five miles,” and I told her maybe we wouldn’t go until spring anyway, and things had become so sad by this time that I thought I had better go on to the next neighbor’s; so I left them with their heads on each other’s shoulders, saying something in low tones.

In a few days father returned again from Silverton and said he had promised that he would take the Grange store in the spring. It seemed as though winter would never pass; it actually lasted years. We talked of nothing else during the evenings, and I thought of nothing else, dreamed of nothing else during the nights. Finally as spring opened we thought of Old John, a big, fat,