Free On The Banks Of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder Page B

Laura's box, and Mary's quilt blocks and her scrapbag were in Mary's box. Behind the curtain each had her nail, to take her nightgown off and hang her dress on. The single thing wrong with that room was that Jack could not climb up the ladder.
    Laura went to sleep at once. She had been running in and out of the new house and up and down the ladder all day long. But she could not stay asleep. Thenew house was so still. She missed the sound of the creek singing to her in her sleep. The stillness kept waking her.
    At last it was a sound that opened her eyes.
    She listened. It was a sound of many, many little feet running about overhead. It seemed to be thousands of little animals scampering on the roof. What could it be?
    Why, it was raindrops! Laura had not heard rain pattering on the roof for so long that she had forgotten the sound of it. In the dugout she could not hear rain, there was so much earth and grass above her.
    She was happy while she lay drowsing to sleep again, hearing the pitter-pat-patter of rain on the roof.

THE OLD CRAB AND THE BLOODSUCKERS
    when Laura jumped out of bed in the morning, her bare feet landed on a smooth, wooden floor. She smelled the piny smell of boards. Overhead was the slanting roof of yellow-bright shingles and the rafters holding them up.
    From the eastern window she saw the little path going down the grassy knoll. She saw a square corner of the pale-green, silky wheat-field, and beyond it the gray-green oats. Far, far away was the edge of the great, green earth, and a silver streak of the sun's edge peeping over it. The willow creek and the dugout seemed far away and long ago.
    Suddenly, warm yellow sunshine poured over her in her nightgown. On the clean wood-yellow floor the panes of the window were sunshine, the little bars between them were shadow, and Laura's head in the nightcap, her braids, and her hands with all the separate fingers when she held them up, were darker, solid shadow.
    Downstairs the lids clattered on the new, fine cookstove. Ma's voice came up through the square hole where the ladder went down.
    “Mary! Laura! Time to get up, girls!”
    That was the way a new day began in the new house.
    But while they were eating breakfast in the large, airy downstairs Laura wanted to see the creek. She asked Pa if she might go back to play there.
    “No, Laura,” Pa said. “I don't want you to go back to that creek, where the dark, deep holes are. But when your work is done, you and Mary run along that path that Nelson made coming to work, and see what you find!”
    They hurried to do the work. And in the lean-to they found a boughten broom! There seemed no end to the wonders in this house.
    This broom had a long, straight, perfectly round, smooth handle. The broom part was made of thousands of thin, stiff, greeny-yellow bristles. Ma said they were broom straws.
    They were cut absolutely straight across the bottom, and they curved at the top into flat, firm shoulders. Stitches of red string held them tight. This broom was nothing like the round, willow-bough brooms that Pa made. It seemed too fine to sweep with. And it glided over the smooth floor like magic.
    Still, Laura and Mary could hardly wait to follow that path. They worked fast; they put away the broom, and they started. Laura was in such a hurry that she walked nicely only a few steps, then she began to run. Her bonnet slid back and hung by its strings around her neck and her bare feet flew over the dim, grassy path, down the knoll, across a bit of level land, up a low slope. And there was the creek!
    Laura was astonished. This was such a different-looking creek, too, so gentle in the sun between its low, grassy banks.
    The path stopped in the shade of a great willow tree. A footbridge went on across the water to level, sunny grass. Then the dim path wandered on until it curved around a tiny hill and went out of sight.
    Laura thought that little path went on forever wandering on sunny grass and crossing friendly