Miss Cordelia’s Accommodation
by
“Poor little creatures!” said Miss Cordelia compassionately.
She meant the factory children. In her car ride from the school where she taught to the bridge that spanned the river between Pottstown, the sooty little manufacturing village on one side, and Point Pleasant, which was merely a hamlet, on the other, she had seen dozens of them, playing and quarrelling on the streets or peering wistfully out of dingy tenement windows.
“Tomorrow is Saturday,” she reflected, “and they’ve no better place to play in than the back streets and yards. It’s a shame. There’s work for our philanthropists here, but they don’t seem to see it. Well, I’m so sorry for them it hurts me to look at them, but I can’t do anything.”
Miss Cordelia sighed and then brightened up, because she realized that she was turning her back upon Pottstown for two blissful days and going to Point Pleasant, which had just one straggling, elm-shaded street hedging on old-fashioned gardens and cosy little houses and trailing off into the real country in a half-hour’s walk.
Miss Cordelia lived alone in a tiny house at Point Pleasant. It was so tiny that you would have wondered how anyone could live in it.
“But it’s plenty big for a little old maid like me,” Miss Cordelia would have told you. “And it’s my own–I’m queen there. There’s solid comfort in having one spot for your own self. To be sure, if I had less land and more house it would be better.”
Miss Cordelia always laughed here. It was one of her jokes. There was a four-acre field behind the house. Both had been left to her by an uncle. The field was of no use to Miss Cordelia; she didn’t keep a cow and she hadn’t time to make a garden. But she liked her field; when people asked her why she didn’t sell it she said:
“I’m fond of it. I like to walk around in it when the grass grows long. And it may come in handy some time. Mother used to say if you kept anything seven years it would come to use. I’ve had my field a good bit longer than that, but maybe the time will come yet. Meanwhile I rejoice in the fact that I am a landed proprietor to the extent of four acres.”
Miss Cordelia had thought of converting her field into a playground for the factory children and asking detachments of them over on Saturday afternoon. But she knew that her Point Pleasant neighbours would object to this, so that project was dropped.
When Miss Cordelia pushed open her little gate, hung crookedly in a very compact and prim spruce hedge, she stopped in amazement and said, “Well, for pity’s sake!”
Cynthia Ann Flemming, who lived on the other side of the spruce hedge, now came hurrying over.
“Good evening, Cordelia. I have a letter that was left with me for you.”
“But–that–horse,” said Miss Cordelia, with a long breath between every word. “Where did he come from? Tied at my front door–and he’s eaten the tops off every one of my geraniums! Where’s his owner or rider or something?”
The horse in question was a mild-eyed, rather good-looking quadruped, tied by a halter to the elm at Miss Cordelia’s door and contentedly munching a mouthful of geranium stalks. Cynthia Ann came through the hedge with the letter.
“Maybe this will explain,” she said. “Same boy brought it as brought the horse–a little freckly chap mostly all grin and shirtsleeves. Said he was told to take the letter and horse to Miss Cordelia Herry, Elm Street, Point Pleasant, and he couldn’t wait. So he tied the creature in there and left the letter with me. He came half an hour ago. Well, he has played havoc with your geraniums and no mistake.”
Miss Cordelia opened and read her letter. When she finished it she looked at the curious Cynthia Ann solemnly.