Free Seven-Day Magic by Edward Eager

some books by a wonderful woman called Mrs. Wilder, who had lived in a little house in a big woods and later in a little house on the prairie, in the olden times, and when Grannie couldn't find new books about the old West, she frequently read these. They reminded her of herself when she was in her prime, she said.
    Perhaps here is as good a place as any to explain about Grannie's character a little more.
    It wasn't that she was childish or weak-minded. On the contrary. Her will was almost too strong. It was just that she had been a tomboy for twenty years (even when she was teaching school, which she started at fifteen!) and an active woman for fifty years after that, and now that she was old, she sometimes forgot that she was a tomboy and active no longer.
    "I'm still the same, inside," she would explain, when Susan or John begged her to be careful and not climb trees or run or jump.
    Susan often thought Grannie must have been a wonderful little girl, and later on an exciting teacher to have, and wished that she could have known her then.
    And poetic Abbie once came on a poem that reminded her of Grannie. It was about a pioneer woman called Lucinda Matlock, who worked hard and played hard and had twelve children and lived to be ninety-six and enjoyed every bit of it. Abbie read it to the others, and they all agreed that it expressed Grannie to a T.
    All this made the five children patient when Grannie needed curbing and toning down now.
    Tonight as Grannie read, her eyes sparkled and her tutting was louder than usual, causing John to stir restlessly over his puzzle and Susan to look up from her work more than once.
    The second time Susan looked up, her glance stayed fixed and her sewing fell from her lap and she must have made a sound, for John looked up, too, and saw what she was seeing.
    The book Grannie was reading wasn't one of Mrs. Wilder's stories about Plum Creek or Silver Lake, and it wasn't the new book of Western reminiscences Susan had brought her from the library, either.
    It was a red book, smallish but plump, comfortable and shabby and familiar!
    So
that
was where the magic book had been all along, thought Susan. Grannie must have found it on the porch and opened it and started to read, and got interested.
    But if Barnaby's idea was right and the magic book was different for each person, what was Grannie reading now that made her eyes shine so and brought bright color to her cheeks? A girlhood adventure of her own or of some other pioneer heroine?
    Then, just as Susan was trying to stammer out, "What are you reading?" Grannie's gaze left the page, and she stared speculatively before her with the unmistakable expression of an enthralled reader who is about to wish that her book were true and she were part of the thick of it.
    John's and Susan's thoughts were as one and their speed was even quicker. Together they sprang across the room just in time to touch the book and add the words "and take us along, too" as the unspoken wish formed itself in Grannie's mind.
    And the book did.
    There was a whoosh, and the colors of the room ran together and shot up like fireworks. In a second of dazzlement Susan found time to wonder where they'd suddenly find themselves next, in a log cabin in a wolf-haunted woods or on the lone prairie where the coyote howls so mournfully.
    The next second she knew the answer.
    Where they found themselves was on an open and windy and wintry plain, before a little raw new one-room building that looked exactly like every picture anyone has ever seen of an old-fashioned schoolhouse. John was standing at her side, looking just as startled as she felt.
    But where was Grannie?
    Apparently nowhere.
    In front of the schoolhouse some children were playing Fox and Geese in the hard, crusty snow that carpeted the ground. Leading the game was a tall girl with sparkling black eyes. Next minute the game developed into a snowball fight, and the tall girl pitched snowballs right and left, throwing hard and