Eleven-year-old Rebecca Randall is quite a handful—and now she’s leaving her beloved Sunnybrook Farm to live with her well-to-do elderly aunts and get an education. But they were expecting Rebecca’s quiet, hard-working older sister instead. Can the bright-eyed and talkative girl win them over…especially her strict, rule-bound Aunt Miranda? Just as Rebecca’s “grand spirit” charms everyone in the story, it will captivate readers, too.
income of fifteen dollars a month seldom has time to discriminate carefully between the various members of her brood, but Hannah at fourteen was at once companion and partner in all her mother’s problems. She it was who kept the house while Aurelia busied herself in barn and field. Rebecca was capable of certain set tasks, such as keeping the small children from killing themselves and one another, feeding the poultry, picking up chips, hulling strawberries, wiping dishes; but she was thought
the middle of her flat little chest. “Hind side foremost? Oh, I see! No, that’s all right. If you have seven children you can’t keep buttonin’ and unbuttonin’ ’em all the time—they have to do themselves. We’re always buttoned up in front at our house. Mira’s only three, but she’s buttoned up in front, too.” Miranda said nothing as she closed the door, but her looks were at once equivalent to and more eloquent than words. Rebecca stood perfectly still in the center of the floor and looked about
“Do I look as if I did?” he responded unexpectedly. Rebecca dimpled. “I didn’t mean that; I have some soap to sell; I mean I would like to introduce to you a very remarkable soap, the best now on the market. It is called the”— “Oh! I must know that soap,” said the gentleman genially. “Made out of pure vegetable fats, isn’t it?” “The very purest,” corroborated Rebecca. “No acid in it?” “Not a trace.” “And yet a child could do the Monday washing with it and use no force.” “A babe,” corrected
rather mollified by and pleased with the turn of events, although she did not intend to show it, or give anybody any reason to expect that this expression of hospitality was to serve for a precedent on any subsequent occasion. “Well, I see you did only what you was obliged to do, Rebecca,” she said, “and you worded your invitation as nice as anybody could have done. I wish your aunt Jane and me wasn’t both so worthless with these colds; but it only shows the good of havin’ a clean house, with
an’ Mirandy had the brick house. She probably took it awful hard that Rebecca’s fifty dollars had to be swallowed up in a mortgage, ’stead of goin’ towards school expenses. The more I think of it, the more I think Adam Ladd intended Rebecca should have that prize when he gave it.” The mind of Huldah’s mother ran towards the idea that her daughter’s rights had been assailed. “Land, Marthy, what foolishness you talk!” exclaimed Mrs. Perkins; “you don’t suppose he could tell what composition the
