Family Sabbatical (Nancy Pearl's Book Crush Rediscoveries) by Brink Carol Ryrie

Author:Brink, Carol Ryrie [Brink, Carol Ryrie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781477829981
Publisher: Two Lions
Published: 2015-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

First Stop on the Journey

One cannot be sad for long on a journey. Even the sad thoughts of a foreign school ahead and Mademoiselle and the collection left behind were soon lost in the novelty of travel. The Ridgeways rode away on the very train that they had so often watched from the top of the grotto. Compared to an American train it seemed like a toy. It had a small engine with a shrill whistle, and each car was divided into small sections in which were two long seats facing each other. The Ridgeways occupied one of these seats. They sat in a row, and opposite them sat an old man with a newspaper, an old woman with a basket of eggs, and a boy with a cardboard box punched full of holes. It didn’t take George long to find out that there was a kitten in the box and that the boy was taking it as a present to his grandmother in Marseilles.

Even the few things that they had learned from Mademoiselle came in handy here. George made a small ball of paper and tied it to the end of a string, and then he said to the boy, “Le chat joue avec le ballon.” The boy understood at once and took the cover off the box and let the kitten play with the paper on the string. It was quite remarkable. Even Father was impressed.

So the time passed very pleasantly until they arrived in Marseilles, where they intended to spend a couple of days seeing all the historical sights.

“Our journey north,” Father said, “will be a kind of historical pilgrimage. We’ll take in all the castles and dungeons and places where things happened that we can in the short time at our disposal.”

“Yes, Daddy,” the children said. So the first day in Marseilles they went out to look at the Old Harbor, which was full of boats and very old houses and history and the smell of fish. They had a kind of fish soup for luncheon that was called bouillabaisse. Dumpling and George really preferred Mr. Campbell’s vegetable-with-alphabet soup. Whenever anyone offered George fish, no matter how nicely it was cooked, he would say, “Fish is for cats.” But Susan enjoyed the fish soup because Father read them a famous poem which had been written many years ago by William Makepeace Thackeray. The poem was all about the bouillabaisse of Marseilles.

George, not being interested in either poetry or fish, thought that it would be nice to put all the fish he didn’t eat into a piece of paper and take it out to some poor hungry cat who would welcome such a treat.

But Mother said, “No, darling. If you won’t carry it inside, I’m certainly not going to let you carry it outside.”

“Besides,” said Father, “we have another historical pilgrimage to make.”

They all sighed at this news, because their legs were tired, but it turned out that this excursion was to be somewhat different.

They took a

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