five little peppers and how they grew by margaret sidney

What they failed to do couldn't very well be done by anyone! Polly was ten, and Ben one year older and the younger three of the Five Little Peppers, as they were always called, looked up to them with the intensest admiration and Love. For this brother and sister were everything to each other and stood loyally together through thick and thin. Many and vast were their secret plans by which they were to astonish her at some future day, which they would only confide - as they did everything else - to one another. 'To help mother' was the great ambition of all the children, older and younger but in Polly's and Ben's souls, the desire grew so overwhelmingly great as to absorb all lesser thoughts. But- 'Well, it'll come sometime,' she would say to herself, 'because it must!' And so at it again she would fly, brisker than ever. And then, when the way seemed clear again, the store changed hands, so that for a long time she failed to get her usual supply of sacks and coats to make, and that made sad havoc in the quarters and half-dollars laid up as her nest egg. Once or twice she had thought, 'Now the time is coming!' but it never did: for winter shut in very cold, and it took so much more to feed and warm them that the money went faster than ever. 'I must get schooling for them some way, but I don't see how!' 'They haven't had any bringing up they've just scrambled up!' And then she would set her lips together tightly and fly at her work faster than ever.

So with a stout heart and a cheery face, she had worked away day after day at making coats and tailoring and mending of all descriptions and she had seen with pride that couldn't be concealed her noisy, happy brood growing up around her and filling her heart with comfort, and making the little brown house fairly ring with jollity and fun. But she had met life too bravely to be beaten down now. Pepper had had hard work to scrape together money enough to put bread into her children's mouths and to pay the rent of the little brown house. All the breathing spell they could remember, however, poor things, for times were always hard with them nowadays and since the father died when Phronsie was a baby, Mrs. It was just on the edge of the twilight, and the little Peppers, all except Ben, the oldest of the flock, were enjoying a breathing spell, as their mother called it, which meant some quiet work suitable for the hour. He little old kitchen had quieted down from the bustle and confusion of midday, and now, with its afternoon manners on, presented a holiday aspect that, as the principal room in the brown house, it was eminently proper it should have.

'Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew 'The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew' by Margaret Sidney: Chapter 1

Five little peppers and how they grew by margaret sidney