Nellie Caine by Mail. Stories for children

THE   FARMER'S  WIFE  looked  up  from  the  list  she  was  writing  to where,  in the light  of the lamp, the farmer was reading the news• paper  on  the  other  side  of  the  kitchen  table.  It  was  after  the children's bedtime,  and all three  of them were fast asleep.
"Why don't you send to the mail-order house for a pair of blue
pants?"  she asked.  "Joe  Plow has some and they're elegant."
The farmer was deep in his paper and didn't know that his wife had spoken.
So she said again,  "Why don't  you send for some elegant  pants like Joe  Plow's?"
"What?"  the farmer  asked.  "Oh, yes, yes, to be sure."
And he put down his paper,  and  got  the pen and ink  and  pad,


and wrote  to the mail-order house,  and sent  in his wife's  list,  too. But he was getting sleepy, and instead of "Pants No. 754," as he should have written,  he wrote,  "elegant  pants" in  a very careless sort  of handwriting.
About  a  week  later,  he  received  a  letter  from  the  mail-order house. He couldn't make  head nor tail out of it.  The  letter  talked



about  how  the  mail-order  house  always  tried  to  please  its  cus• tomers, and to send them whatever  they wanted, and what trouble it  had taken  to fill his order,  and that Nellie was being forwarded
the  same  day,  and  that the  mail-order  house  hoped  the  farmer would be satisfied,  as the call for this kind of goods was not great. The farmer and his wife read the letter a dozen times, and next day waited  for the  mail carrier  with  a great  deal of curiosity.  He was three  hours  late,  and  when  he finally  drove his  car into  the dooryard  he looked  mad.  And you can't  blame  him,  for  what  do you think  he had,  fastened  to the  back  of the car? A large  gray
elephant!
"And when she gets tired, she just sits down, and my car stops!" the mail carrier shouted. "You ought to be ashamed  of yourselves, buying elephants  at your age!"
"It's  all a dreadful  mistake,"  the  farmer  began,  but  just  then
Nellie wrapped her dusty trunk  lovingly about his neck and looked down at him sadly.



"Elephant, elephant, elephant," the farmer's  wife repeated. And suddenly  she guessed what had happened,  and turned  to her hus• band. "Did you write 'elegant pants' when you wrote to the mail• order house?"
"Why,  maybe I did," said the farmer,  "and  I was rather sleepy,
as I remember.  Perhaps  I ran my words together."
He  was  now  sitting  on  Nellie's  head,  where  she  had  gently placed him.
"She'll have to go straight back," his wife declared.  "But you'd better give her a pail of water  first.  She looks kind of thirsty."
"She's  not  going back,"  said the farmer,  still  high up in the air. "I like her.  Sometimes the work gets pretty heavy for the horses." "It's not a matter of liking," his wife reasoned. "How would you feed  her? You'd have to get  rid of the horses and  the  cows,  too;
she'd eat so much hay."
"I'll get rid of them if I have to," said the farmer.  "Nellie stays." Now  the farmer's  wife knew  that she was  married  to  a very obstinate  man,  so she threw  up her hands  and  went  back  to the kitchen, and made a blueberry pie, and a chocolate cake, and three dozen doughnuts,  and two kinds of cookies to relieve her feelings, while the mail carrier drove on, telling all the neighbors down the road  about  the  farmer's  new  elephant.   But  most  of  them  had already  heard  about  Nellie  by  telephone  from the  neighbors  up
the road, who had seen her.
Meanwhile the farmer took Nellie down to the pond at the edge of the  hayfield  and  let  her  drink  all she wanted  and  go wading, too. They  came back after a jolly afternoon,  and  he fed her half the lettuces,  and a lot  of carrots,  and finished  off her supper  with




an armful  or two  of hay.  And when the children  got  home from school, they helped him feed Nellie, and she took them riding.
The horses and cows didn't care for Nellie, but that didn't mat• ter,  for the  farmer  told them  they'd just  have to get  used to her. "You'll be ruined,"  his wife declared,  and washed all the  down•
stairs  curtains  to relieve her  feelings.
For  a while it  did look as though  the  family  might  be ruined, but not for long. Nellie did her best to help. She plowed the heavi• est field, and when she came to a great boulder, around  which the farmer  and  his  ancestors  had  plowed  for  a  hundred   years,  she pushed  it with her  forehead,  and  dug  at it with her  tusks,  and carried  it  away with  her trunk  to the stone  pile. Soon the neigh• bors hardly  did any work on their  own farms,  because they  spent all  their  time  hanging  around,  watching  Nellie.  The  fields  she plowed were the smoothest in the  county.
When the farmer and his wife and the children wanted to go to town, they rode on Nellie. At  first  the farmer's wife squealed  and said she'd surely  fall  off, but  soon she grew to like  it,  and always wore her best dress and carried  her parasol.
"It  seems  kind  of suitable  when  you  ride  an  elephant,"  she
explained  to her friends.






As for the  children,  they  had  the  time of their lives, and  their friends  ran along by Nellie's side and begged for rides.
When  the  farmer  wanted  to  paint  the  house,  Nellie  let  him stand on her head  and held the paint pot for him with her trunk uplifted.  She  wiped  the  upper  windows clean  for  his  wife.  She pushed  the  lawn  mower and  picked  the  cat  out  of a tree,  when
 the  cat was afraid to come down the way she had gone up.
Nellie was very obliging.
All over the state the chief sub• ject  of  conversation  was  Nellie and what she had last done.
After  a  while the  farmer  saw that  it  would  be  a  good  thing to  turn  all this  interest into ac• count.  So  he  put  up  a  canvas fence along the road and charged people  ten  cents  to  come  in  to see Nellie, and  a quarter if they went   for  a  ride   on  her   back around the barn.
You'd be surprised how the money  kept  pouring  in.  Instead of the farmer being ruined, as his wife had  feared,  they  were soon well off.  And  at the  same  time, they  had  such  fun!  In  the  fall, when  the  hay  was  in  the  barn, and  the  beans  were  drying   on the poles, and the corn and pumpkins were harvested, the country  fairs began,  and  all the family went to  the  nearby  ones, riding Nellie.
At first they  went to see the  fairs, but their  arrival  caused  so much  interest,  and  the  managers  offered them  so much  money to stay, that at last the farmer built a little house on wheels, and, during the  fall, Nellie pulled the caravan  to the fair grounds,  and the whole family lived in it, and gave exhibitions three times a day. The  rest  of the  time they  enjoyed  themselves getting  acquainted






with  the  midgets  and  fortune-tellers  and  the  other  performers. They  got  into  all the  shows free on passes,  and  lived largely  on hot dogs and ice cream cones. For Nellie's performances the farmer's wife wore a scarlet dress and the farmer wore a dress suit and the three  children  wore their  party clothes. They  all had  the  time of their lives.
In the winter they would sit in front of the wood stove and talk about  the interesting things which had happened  at the fairs, and the  people  they  had  met,  and  at  Christmas  they  got  so many Christmas cards from the midgets and fortune-tellers and the other performers,  that the  mail carrier  had  to make  a special trip  out to their  farm. And before many  months had  passed by, the  other animals  on the  place were as proud  of Nellie  as the  family was, and  they,  too,  spent happy  winter  days  hearing  Nellie's  stories about  the fairs she had  visited.
All this happiness  was due to Nellie. And the  farmer's  wife was just as glad as the  farmer  was that he had  been sleepy that eve• ning, when  he wrote with such careless handwriting for "elegant pants"  to  the  nice, kind  mail-order  house, which always  tried  to fill every order,  no matter how peculiar  it might be.