There were a great many holes and shelves and pockets and little
caves in the rocks which made lovely places for playing keep-house. Each
little girl had her own particular cubby-holes and "rooms," and they
"visited" their dolls back and forth all around the pile. And as they
played they talked very fast about all sorts of things, being little
girls and not boys who just yelled and howled inarticulately as they
played ball or duck-on-a-rock or prisoner's goal, racing and running and
wrestling noisily all around the rocks.
There was one child who neither played with the girls nor ran and
whooped with the boys. This was little six-year-old 'Lias, one of the
two boys in Molly's first grade. At recess time he generally hung about
the school door by himself, looking moodily down and knocking the toe of
his ragged, muddy shoe against a stone. The little girls were talking
about him one day as they played. "My! Isn't that 'Lias Brewster the
horridest-looking child!" said Eliza, who had the second grade all to
herself, although Molly now read out of the second reader with her.
"Mercy, yes! So ragged!" said Anastasia Monahan, called Stashie for
short. She was a big girl, fourteen years old, who was in the seventh
grade.
"He doesn't look as if he EVER combed his hair!" said Betsy. "It looks
just like a wisp of old hay."
"And sometimes," little Molly proudly added her bit to the talk of the
older girls, "he forgets to put on any stockings and just has his
dreadful old shoes on over his dirty, bare feet.
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