Page:Up the sunbeams (IA upsunbeams00yate).pdf/20

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they just seemed hateful and sarcastic and selfish; and seemed to draw his mouth and wrinkle his forehead and to give his whole face a sort of critical and ill-natured expression. I turned away right off, but he came around in front of me and smiled with his crooked mouth and he said: 'I'm going to give you a present.'

"'I don't want it,' I said. I didn't want anything that such a man would have.

"'Yes,' he said, 'I'm going to give you some glasses like mine,' and before I could do a thing, he had clapped a pair of them right over my eyes and slipped the string that was on them down over my hair.

"I was so angry that I didn't know what to say and I reached up to take them off; but just then I happened to glance over the valley, and oh, it was dreadful! All of those beautiful people had become ugly. The smile had gone from their eyes, their foreheads were puckered, and their mouths looked hard and unkind; everything that they did was jerky and fretful. They looked at each other as if there wasn't room enough in the valley for them all, and each one wanted all of the rest to get out; and they