The story of Thyrza Author:Alice Brown Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: m THE GOLDEN APPLE V/ne day when Thyrza was a little over fourteen she sat in the orchard eating an " August sweet," and, as she ate, breaking into the bea... more »utiful regular chambers where the brown seeds lay. She was counting the seeds. Thyrza counted a great deal at this time. Now it was a flower with florets or regular petals, or it was even the number of leaves on a spray. Always her voice, as she counted, beat on the words, " yes, no, yes, no," in an earnest monotone. "Yes " meant that before she should be too old she might go to some young ladies' academy and learn the things that make people great. "No" meant that she could never go at all, and that the rest of her life would be spent here in Leafy Road, keeping the bread sweet and covering the squashes in a frost, and even making little thick stubbed trousers, like her mother, and taking her pay in "sass." To-day, as she reached "yes," her mother's voice smote shrilly upon her from the house. " Thyrza! Laura! Where be you ? " Thyrza knew where Laura was. She had gone with Andy McAdam over to the old cider-mill, with a peck of apples tugged between them, to see if theycould start up the mill and make it go. Andy had a strong disbelief that anything short of a horse could turn the great wooden screw, but he was willing to risk walking three-quarters of a mile on the chance, and he was prepared to assert, and indeed had sworn it, that a peck of apples would make as much as a quart of cider, if you could only squeeze it out. They had been willing that Thyrza should go,—not glad but willing, because her perennial hopefulness was hindering on such solemn expeditions; but Barton Gorse had that day given her the "Age of Fable," and she had to read it very fast and all at once. And when she found out what a beautiful book i...« less