Aunt Jo's Scrapbag My girls etc Author:Louisa May Alcott 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: in. THE BOYS' JOKE, AND WHO GOT -THE BEST OF IT. TT was the day before Christmas, and grandpa's big house was swarming with friends and relations, all brim... more »ful of spirits and bent on having a particularly good time. Dinner was over and a brief lull ensued, during which the old folks took naps, the younger ones sat chatting quietly, while the children enlivened the day by a quarrel. It had been brewing for some time, and during that half hour the storm broke. You see, the boys felt injured because for a week at least the girls had been too busy to pay the slightest attention to them and their affairs, — and what's the good of having sisters and cousins if they don't make themselves useful and agreeable to a fellow ? What made it particularly hard to bear was the fact that there was a secret about it, and all they could discover was that they were to have no part in the fun. This added to their wrath, for they could haveborne the temporary neglect, if the girls had been making something nice for them ; but they were not, and the irate lads were coolly informed that they would never know the secret, or benefit by it in the least. Now this sort of thing was not to be borne, you know, and after affecting to scorn the whole concern, the boys were finally goaded to confess to one another that they were dying to learn what was going on, though no power on earth would make them own as much to the girls. It certainly was very tantalizing to the poor fellows penned up in the breakfast-room (to keep the house quiet for an hour) to see the girls prance in and out of the library with the most aggravating air of importance and delight; to watch mysterious parcels borne along; to hear cries of rapture, admiration, or alarm from the next room, and to know that fun of some sort was going...« less