The Hidden Thimble

1916

Eleanor Fairfield Canfield.

There were seven little girls at Irma's party and they were having a glorious time. It was a farewell party for Mildred Smith, who was going away the next day to live in another city, and none of these little girls knew when they would ever see her again.


They had just decided to play "Hide the thimble;" so Irma went to find a thimble. She looked in her mother's work-basket. The only thimble there was her mother's pretty silver one.

"Mother's busy," thought Irma, "and I don't think she would care if I took this."

They had hidden and found it several times. At last it was Mildred Smith's turn to hide it. They all went out of the parlor.

"Ready," called Mildred, and they started back to look for the thimble, when suddenly, Clang! Clang! rang from the street.

All the little girls ran to the window. The fire-engines were rushing past, the great hoofs of the horses pounding the pavement. It was wonderful to see them.

"When you are through watching the engines, you can come in the dining room, girlies," cried Irma's mother. Soon they were all seated around the table, eating ice cream and cake and chattering happily.

As the little guests were leaving, Mildred promised them all, and the little hostess, too, that she would surely write to them. "I will write you and send you my address," she said, "because I don't know just what it is going to be now."

The next evening Irma's mother picked up the sewing.

"I don't know where my thimble can be," she said, "I can't find it anywhere."

"O mamma," said Irma, and then she stopped short. Where was the thimble? The last thing she remembered about it was that Mildred had hidden it. She told her mother about it, and then she started to look for the thimble.

By the clock, on the mantel, in corners, all around the piano, Irma searched, but no little silver thimble did she find. Her mother looked sober, for she had had that thimble for so long and she loved the person who had given it to her.

"Never mind, Irma, we'll surely find it. Wait until morning light and it may show up," she said. But it did not show up the next day nor the next! And the worst of it was that not a word did anybody hear from Mildred, so they could not write and ask her where she had hid it.

Irma gave it up as lost finally, and very badly she felt about it. She took the money out of the bank and with some more that her father gave her she bought another pretty silver thimble for her mother.

One afternoon in spring the sun shown in through the parlor windows. Irma hapened to look at the ferns that stood on a stand near the window. A ray of light shone straight from the largest sword-fern into her eyes.

"What is it?" she thought, and she got up and walked over to the fern. Then she gave a sharp cry.

"Mother, mother, your thimble!"

Her mother was at her side in a moment. There, resting on a fuzzy graygreen head of a tink[*] fern-leaf, was the thimble!

Mildred had hidden it well among the roots of the sword-fern, and as a tiny leaf had unfolded, it had raised the thimble with it until it just showed above the tangle roots.

"I think the little fern-leaf got tired of having us look for the thimble, and it just had to tell us where it was hidden," said Irma. And mother smiled happily. — Little Ones.

Note: [*] Maybe should be "thin fern-leaf," I don't know. It actually read "tink fer-leaf," and since errors are common in newspaper articles, there's no real reason to assume anything is correct.