On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Author:Laura Ingalls Wilder [Wilder, Laura Ingalls]
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780060264710
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1953-08-15T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

Country Party

Will you come to my party?” Laura asked Christy and Maud and Nellie Oleson. Mary asked the big girls. They all said they would come.

That Saturday morning the new house was specially pretty. Jack could not come in on the scrubbed floors. The windows were shining and the pink-edged curtains were freshly crisp and white. Laura and Mary made new starry papers for the shelves, and Ma made vanity cakes.

She made them with beaten eggs and white flour. She dropped them into a kettle of sizzling fat. Each one came up bobbing, and floated till it turned itself over, lifting up its honey-brown, puffy bottom. Then it swelled underneath till it was round, and Ma lifted it out with a fork.

She put every one of those cakes in the cupboard. They were for the party.

Laura and Mary and Ma and Carrie were dressed up and waiting when the guests came walking out from town. Laura had even brushed Jack though he was always clean and handsome in his white and brown-spotted short fur.

He ran down with Laura to the ford. The girls came laughing and splashing through the sunny water, all except Nellie. She had to take off her shoes and stockings and she complained that the gravel hurt her feet. She said: “I don’t go bare-footed. I have shoes and stockings.”

She was wearing a new dress and big, new hair-ribbon bows.

“Is that Jack?” Christy asked, and they all patted him and said what a good dog he was. But when he politely wagged to Nellie, she said: “Go away! Don’t you touch my dress!”

“Jack wouldn’t touch your dress,” Laura said.

They went up the path between the blowing grasses and wild flowers, to the house where Ma was waiting. Mary told her the girls’ names one by one, and she smiled her lovely smile and spoke to them. But Nellie smoothed down her new pretty dress and said to Ma:

“Of course I didn’t wear my best dress to just a country party.”

Then Laura didn’t care what Ma had taught her; she didn’t care if Pa punished her. She was going to get even with Nellie for that. Nellie couldn’t speak that way to Ma.

Ma only smiled and said: “It’s a very pretty dress, Nellie. We’re glad you could come.” But Laura was not going to forgive Nellie.

The girls liked the pretty house. It was so clean and airy, with sweet-smelling breezes blowing through it and the grassy prairies all around. They climbed the ladder and looked at Laura’s and Mary’s very own attic; none of them had anything like that. But Nellie asked, “Where are your dolls?”

Laura was not going to show her darling rag Charlotte to Nellie Oleson. She said: “I don’t play with dolls. I play in the creek.”

Then they went outdoors with Jack. Laura showed them the little chicks by the haystacks, and they looked at the green garden rows and the thick-growing wheat-field. They ran down the knoll to the low bank of Plum Creek.

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