[Gutenberg 64458] • A Silent Singer

century Fiction by Clara Morris

It had been a hot day and the minister had taken us, my mother and I, from the city to his country house, in a mysterious kind of antediluvian gig. Of the whole race of men it is only the minister of the country who can discover this particular breed of buggy. They are always endowed with strange powers of resistance; never having been bought until they have apparently reached the point of dissolution, thereafter, for years and years, they will shake and sway, sway and sway, carrying all the time not just people but almost every kind imaginable of merchandise, from a few pounds of groceries to a pumpkin or a very young calf, without getting one step closer to their final wreck.

This special stroller could keep one person comfortable, two uncomfortable and three torturing. I had been the third part group of that day's race, and exhausted, crumpled and dusty, we went from darkness to a room full of lights and faces. I was trying to steadily support myself on a pair of legs so recently awakened from dumb sleep that they had barely reached the tickle stage, and the power of ten thousand needles was at full blast when Reverend Hyler introduced me to his seven children.