These happy golden years pdf download

There would be no more sleighing parties, Laura knew, and she was sorry. Pa and Ma and Uncle Tom were talking of people she did not know, while they all sat around the table after a late Sunday dinner, when a shadow passed the window.

Laura knew the knock at the door, and she hastened to open it, wondering why Almanzo had come. Almanzo helped her up to the front seat and took the reins from Cap as he sat down beside her. Then Prince and Lady trotted away up the street and out on the prairie road toward the east. No one else was out driving, so this was not a party, but Laura and Mary and Cap were laughing and merry. The road was slushy. Water and bits of snow spattered the horses and buggy and the linen lap robes across their knees.

But the spring wind was soft on their faces and the sun was warmly shining. Almanzo did not join in the merry talk. He drove steadily, without a smile or a word, until Laura asked him what was the matter.

Laura was astonished. Mary burst out laughing. Cap must be stopped, for if Mary lost any more hairpins, her beautiful large knot of hair would come off. Laura nipped up the bit of snow and neatly dropped it inside his collar at the back of his neck. Two girls against me is too many.

It was so easy to laugh in the springtime. When Laura came home from school at noon, he was gone. McKee came. She is in distress, Laura, and asked me if you would help her out. McKee had worked at dressmaking all that winter, the McKees could not afford to move to their claim yet.

McKee must keep his job at the lumberyard until they saved money enough to buy tools and seed and stock. He wanted Mrs. McKee to take their little girl, Mattie, and live on the claim that summer, to hold it.

McKee said she would not live out there on the prairie, all alone, with no one but Mattie; she said they could lose the claim, first. It seems that being all alone, miles from anybody, scares her. So, as she told me, Mr. McKee said he would let the claim go.

After he went to work, she was thinking it over, and she came to tell me that if you would go with her, she would go hold down the claim. She said she would give you a dollar a week, just to stay with her as one of the family.

Manchester was a new little town, west of De Smet. Likely it will work out all right, somehow. McKee and Mattie on the train to Manchester. She had been on the cars once before, when she came west from Plum Creek, so she felt like a seasoned traveler as she followed the brakeman with her satchel, down the aisle to a seat.

It was not as though she knew nothing about trains. It was a seven mile journey to Manchester. There the trainmen unloaded Mrs. If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed. Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to classics, historical lovers.

Your Rating:. Their surface looked like dry caked mud, except in places where it was stained with different and brilliant colors. The floor of this sunken land was scattered thick with petrified shells and skulls and bones. It was a heathenish place to be in, Uncle Torn said. The wagon wheels crunched over the bones, and those tall things seemed to turn as you went by, and some of them looked like faces, and outlandish idols.

The wagons had to go between them, following the gulches or valleys. Winding around among those queer things, they got lost. Looking back over it, an old prospector told Uncle Tom that it must be the Bad Lands of which he had heard tales from the Indians. There they found shelter from the fierce prairie winds, but the going was hard because the valleys were full of snow and the hills were steep.

They had been traveling seventy-eight days when they made their last camp on French Creek. Here they cut pine logs from the hills, and built a stockade eighty feet square. They chopped the logs thirteen feet long, and set them upright, tightly together, sinking the bottom ends three feet into the ground. It was hard digging, the ground being frozen. On the inside of this wall, they battened it with smaller logs, pegged over every crack between the larger logs, with heavy wooden pegs.

At each corner of the square stockade they made stout log bastions, standing out, to give them a crossfire along the outside of the walls. In these bastions, and also along the walls, they cut portholes.

The only entrance to this blockade was a double gate, twelve feet wide, made of large logs solidly pegged together with wooden pins. It was a good stockade, when they got it finished. Inside they built seven little log cabins, and there they lived through the winter. They hunted for their meat, and trapped for furs. The winter was bitter cold, but they pulled through, and toward spring they found gold, nuggets of it, and rich gold dust in the frozen gravel and under the ice in the creek beds.

About the same time, the Indians attacked them. They could hold off the Indians all right, in that stockade. The trouble was that they would starve to death in it, if they could not get out of it to hunt.

The Indians hung around, not fighting much but driving back any party that started out, and waiting for them to starve. So they cut down rations and tightened their belts, to hang on as long as they could before they had to kill their ox teams. Then one morning they heard, far off, a bugle! They knew they were all right now; the soldiers were coming. The lookouts yelled, and everybody crowded up into the bastions to watch.

They heard the bugle again. Soon they heard the fife and drum, and then they saw the flag flying, and the troops coming behind it. They threw open the gate and rushed out, all of them, fast as they could to meet the soldiers. The soldiers took them all prisoner, there where they were, and kept them there, while some of the troops went on and burned the stockade, with everything in it. They burned the cabins and the wagons, and the furs, and killed the oxen.

They marched us out on foot, prisoners. Just when Charles had got glass windows into it. No wonder Grace is asleep. All day while she was sewing with Mrs. He was leaving early Monday morning for his home in Wisconsin. Only scattered patches of snow were left on the muddy ground.

There would be no more sleighing parties, Laura knew, and she was sorry. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest.

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