Free A Girl from Yamhill by Beverly Cleary Page A

“Rumpelstiltskin”—all stories worth reading again.
    Thanks to Miss Marius, I could read, but I refused to read outside of school.
    â€œEveryone in our family has always loved to read,” said my puzzled mother. “I can’t understand why you won’t.”
    Neither could I, but I felt reading should be confined to school, and only when required.
    Miss Marius taught us a rousing song about apeanut that sat on a railroad track with the train coming “a-chunk, a-chunk.” When, in that last line, the train ran over the peanut, we all sang with glee at the top of our voices, “Toot-toot! Peanut butter!” Miss Marius also let us sing the popular songs of the day, “Last Night on the Back Porch” and a song about “Barney Google with his goo-goo-googley eyes.” On Friday afternoons, before the last bell, we told jokes and riddles.
    For exercise, we stood in the aisles, one hand on a desk, the other on the back of our seat, and recited, “Jack, be nimble. Jack, be quick.” On “Jack jumped over the candlestick,” we jumped over our seats.
    In December, Miss Marius told us we could bring cake or cookies from home for a party the day before Christmas vacation.
    Mother, however, was not to be persuaded. “My land, forty children, all with cakes and cookies!” she said. “Poor Miss Marius. You’ll all get sick.”
    â€œBut Miss Marius wants me to bring something,” I insisted, for I knew a teacher’s word was law to parents.
    We reached a compromise. I took forty sticks of gum to pass out to the class, which turned out better than I had expected. The classroom was a mess, a glorious mess of crumbs, frosting, smeared faces, and sticky fingers. I walked up and down the aisles passing out welcome sticksof spearmint gum, which may have helped settle a few stomachs. No one threw up, at least not in the classroom.
    Although the excesses of the party probably had nothing to do with it, I became ill with a sore throat and a high fever. Mother was frightened. She put me to bed on a couch in the dining room, where she could keep an eye on me. She piled on blankets, which I pushed back; she pulled them up again, saying, “You must stay covered up. You might get pneumonia.” Mother was always afraid of my catching pneumonia or tuberculosis.
    She consulted the Frenchwoman next door, who was a practical nurse. Mrs. Williams brought over a fever thermometer, which registered one hundred and six. She pulled off some of the blankets and advised Mother to call a doctor. He came two days later to say I had tonsillitis.
    All I remember is a strange sinking sensation, as if I were going through a white tunnel toward a light at the end, with the sound of the telegraph wires of Yamhill humming in my ears.
    I recovered to find my reader, delivered by a neighbor child, probably that Bluebird, on the couch beside me. At Mother’s urging, but without enthusiasm, I picked up the book and read a story about American Indians. I felt a languidinterest in the discovery that a reader could tell me something I did not already know. Then I laid the book aside.
    The happy calm of the second grade was interrupted one day when Miss Marius asked us to stand and march into the third-grade classroom, where each of us had to share a seat with a third-grader. We discovered, propped up in the front of the room, a large black circle with numbers and letters painted on small white circles. Over this was another black circle, this one with round holes that revealed the letters and numbers underneath. We stopped whispering, giggling, and pushing to stare.
    The third-grade teacher introduced a man from the telephone company, who explained that Portland was going to use the dial system. “All telephones must have dials,” he said, pointing to the mysterious object in front of the room. The man explained the system of numbers and letters, moving the big black