Free The Four-Story Mistake by Elizabeth Enright

grandmother.”
    â€œOr rich either, probably,” said Mona witheringly.
    â€œGo on now,” Cuffy said. “All of you. Out! He has to have his temperature taken before he eats these hot things. And he has to have an aspirin afterward. ”
    Rush was sick in bed for over a week with bronchitis, and except for the first two days enjoyed every minute of it. Father brought him some new books, Oliver loaned him his comics, and Willy the back issues of Popular Mechanics. Cuffy was always making delicious streamlined things that went down his throat without bumping it. Nobody was allowed to come into the room to see him except grownups, who were tough old things, less liable to catch his germs. But Cuffy spent hours mending in the rocker beside the window; she was always good company and so was Father, who spent each evening with him, and Willy Sloper, who came for frequent conversational visits. When he was alone, Rush read and read and read. When he got tired of reading he played the gramophone or his radio. When he got tired of that he worked on his model airplanes, and when he got tired of that he added the finishing touches to a story he was writing called “The Ghost in the Dumbwaiter,” and when he got tired of that he simply lay still and watched the swaying spruce branches against the grey sky, and listened to the music inside his head. Sometimes he just slept.
    Yes, it was a fine illness. But after eight days of it he was glad to be up again; tottering weak and pale about the house. Also he retained a distinctive bass cough, more animal than human, that hung on for weeks and startled everyone who heard it. It kept him provided with free cough drops, oranges, lozenges, and whole jars of honey. He was quite sorry when he got over it.

CHAPTER VI
    Clarinda, 1869
    â€œIt’s snowing!” cried Randy one Saturday morning from her roost in the cupola. She had gone up there with a book of Father’s called Jean-Christophe which she didn’t understand. “Real snow!” she shouted exultantly, forgetting all about the strange boy in the book and tumbling down the steps to the Office. “First I thought it was just ashes from the chimney but I watched and it melted right on the windowsill!”
    Rush stopped playing the piano. Mona stopped writing her play. Oliver stopped trying to draw a battle between fourteen airplanes and thirteen submarines, all on the same sheet of paper. With one accord they went downstairs, put on their coats and, as an afterthought, their galoshes, and went outdoors. None of them had ever seen snow in the country. At first it wasn’t very exciting, really. The sparse, papery flakes flew down, alighted, and vanished without making any difference on the landscape.
    But Oliver made a discovery.
    â€œLook,” he said, examining the snowflakes on his sleeve. “They’re shaped like little sort of fuzzy stars.”
    Oh, everybody knew that!
    â€œDidn’t you really ever notice it before, Oliver?” Randy sounded astonished. Nevertheless, she ran into the house and borrowed one of the lenses from Rush’s microscope and she and Oliver took turns peering through it at the snow crystals. How wonderful they were! So tiny, so perfect, down to the last point, the last feathering of frost. There were little stars, and miniature geometrical ferns and flowers and patterns for fairy crowns, and tiny hexagons of lace. And each was different from all the others.
    â€œHow can they ever think of so many patterns?” wondered Randy, relinquishing the lens to Oliver.
    â€œHow can who ever think of them?” said Oliver, breathing so hard on the flake he was examining that it turned into a drop of water.
    â€œGod I suppose,” Randy answered, catching some snow on the tip of her tongue and eating it.
    â€œDoes He draw them first, or does He just go ahead and cut them out and drop them?” Oliver wanted to know.
    But that was too much