The next day the Story Girl Uncle Roger to take her to Markdale, and there she bought our dream books. They were ten cents apiece, with ruled pages and mottled green covers. My own lies open beside me as I write, its yellowed pages with the visions that haunted my childish on those nights of long ago.
On the cover is pasted a lady's visiting card, on which is written, "The Dream Book of Beverley King." Cecily had a packet of visiting cards which she was against the day when she would be grown up and could put the calling of the Family Guide into practice; but she generously gave us all one apiece for the covers of our dream books.
As I turn the pages and glance over the (——) records, each one beginning, "Last night I dreamed," the past comes very back to me. I see that bowery , shining in memory with a soft glow of beauty—"the light that never was on land or sea,"—where we sat on those September evenings and wrote down our dreams, when the cares of the day were over and there was nothing to with the pleasing throes of composition. Peter—Dan—Felix—Cecily—Felicity—Sara Ray—the Story Girl—they are all around me once more, in the sweet-scented, fading grasses, each with open dream books and pencil in hand, now writing busily, now staring into space in search of some word or phrase which might best describe the indescribable. I hear their laughing voices, I see their bright, unclouded eyes. In this little, old book, filled with , boyish writing, there is a spell of white magic that sets the years at . Beverley King is a boy once more, writing down his dreams in the old King orchard on the homestead hill, blown over by musky winds.
Opposite to him sits the Story Girl, with her rosetted head, her beautiful bare feet crossed before her, one slender hand her high, white brow, on either side of which fall her curls.
There, to the right, is sweet Cecily of the dear, brown eyes, with a little bloated dictionary beside her—for you dream of so many things you can't spell, or be expected to spell, when you are only eleven. Next to her sits Felicity, beautiful, and conscious that she is beautiful, with hair of sunshine, and sea-blue eyes, and all the roses of that vanished summer abloom in her cheeks.
Peter is beside her, of course, flat on his stomach among the grasses, one hand clutching his black curls, with his dream book on a small, round stone before him—for only so can Peter compose at all, and even then he finds it hard work. He can handle a hoe more than a pencil, and his spelling, even with all his frequent appeals to Cecily, is a fearful and wonderful thing. As for , he never attempts it, beyond an occasion period, down whenever he happens to think of it, whether in the right place or not. The Story Girl goes over his dreams after he has written them out, and puts in the commas and semicolons, and straightens out the sentences.
Felix sits on the right of the Story Girl, fat and , grimly in earnest even over dreams. He writes with his knees stuck up to form a writing-desk, and he always frowns fiercely the whole time.
Dan, like Peter, writes lying down flat, but with his back towards us; and he has a habit of aloud, his whole body, and digging his toes into the grass, when he cannot turn a sentence to suit him.
Sara Ray is at his left. There is seldom anything to be said of Sara except to tell where she is. Like Tennyson's Maud, in one respect at least, Sara is splendidly null.
Well, there we sit and write in our dream books, and Uncle Roger passes by and accuses us of being up to dev—to very bad .
Each of us was very anxious to possess the most exciting record; but we were an little crew, and I do not think anything was ever written down in those dream books which had not really been dreamed. We had expected that the Story Girl would eclipse us all in the matter of dreams; but, at least in the beginning, her dreams were no more than those of the rest of us. In dreamland we were all equal. Cecily, indeed, seemed to have the most talent for dramatic dreams. That and mildest of girls was in the habit of dreaming truly terrible things. Almost every night battle, murder, or sudden death played some part in her visions. On the other hand, Dan, who was a somewhat fellow, to the of novels which he borrowed from the other boys in school, dreamed dreams of such a peaceful and pastoral character that he was quite disgusted with the resulting tame pages of his dream book.
But if the Story Girl could not dream anything more wonderful than the rest of us, she scored when it came to the telling. To hear her tell a dream was as good—or as bad—as dreaming it yourself.
As far as writing them down was concerned, I believe that I, Beverley King, carried off the palm. I was considered to possess a pretty of composition. But the Story Girl went me one better even there, because, having inherited something of her father's talent for drawing, she her dreams with that certainly caught the spirit of them, whatever might be said of their technical . She had an especial knack for drawing monstrosities; and I vividly recall the picture of an enormous and , looking like a of the pterodactyl period, which she had dreamed of seeing crawl across the roof of the house. On another occasion she had a dream—at least, it seemed frightful while she told us and described the dreadful feeling it had given her—of being chased around the parlour by the ottoman, which made faces at her. She drew a picture of the ottoman on the of her dream book which so scared Sara Ray when she it that she cried all the way home, and insisted on sleeping that night with Judy Pineau lest the furniture take to pursuing her also.
Sara Ray's own dreams never amounted to much. She was always in trouble of some sort—couldn't get her hair braided, or her shoes on the right feet. Consequently, her dream book was very . The only thing worth mentioning in the way of dreams that Sara Ray ever achieved was when she dreamed that she went up in a balloon and fell out.
"I expected to come down with an awful thud," she said , "but I lit as light as a feather and woke right up."
"If you hadn't woke up you'd have died," said Peter with a dark significance. "If you dream of falling and DON'T wake you DO land with a thud and it kills you. That's what happens to people who die in their sleep."
"How do you know?" asked Dan skeptically. "Nobody who died in his sleep could ever tell it."
"My Aunt Jane told me so," said Peter.
"I suppose that settles it," said Felicity disagreeably............