Growing Pains Read Online Free Page B

newspaper, put on his spectacles, looked, said, “Um!” Mother said, “You are blacked with charred wood, wash!” The paper sack was found years later among Father’s papers. He had written on it, “By Emily, aged eight.”
    I was allowed to take drawing lessons at the little private school which I attended. Miss Emily Woods came every Monday with a portfolio of copies under her arm. I got the prize for copying a boy with a rabbit. Bessie Nuthall nearly won because her drawing was neat and clean, but my rabbit and boy were better drawn.
    Father pruned the cherry tree under our bedroom window. The cherry sticks were twisty but I took three of the straightest, tied them at one end and straddled them at the other and put two big nails in the wood to hold a drawing-board. With this easel under the dormer window of our bedroom I felt completely anartist. My sister Alice who shared the room complained when she swept round the legs of the easel.
    When I went to the big public school with my sisters we were allowed on Fridays after school to go to Miss Withrow’s house for drawing lessons. I got sick for fear I’d be kept in and miss any of the lesson, so Mother wrote a note to the teacher asking that I be let out on time. My sisters Lizzie and Alice painted flowers, I drew heads.
    Miss Withrow sewed small photographs into little squares with white cotton thread, then she ruled a big sheet of paper with big squares and I drew as much in a big square as there was in a little one. In this way I swelled Father and Mother and my sister’s baby. Father put Mother and himself in gilt frames and gave me five gold dollars. My sister thought my drawn baby was not good enough to be her child.
    The Victoria tombstone-maker got some plaster casts of noses, hands, lips and eyes, to help him model angels for his tombstones. I heard that to draw from casts was the way they learned at Art schools, so I saved my pocket money and bought some of these over-size human features and drew them over and over.
    MY MOTHER DIED when I was twelve years old and my father died two years later. When Father died I was still at school getting into a great deal of trouble for drawing faces on my fingernails and pinafores and textbooks. My sisters and brother were good students. When I moved up a grade the new teacher said, “Ah, another good Carr!” but was disappointed.
    After Father and Mother died my big sister ruled; she was stern like Father. She was twenty years older than the youngest of us. Our family had a wide gap near the top where three brothershad died, so there was Mother’s big family of two grown-up girls and her little family of three small girls and a boy. The second of the big sisters married. The biggest sister owned everything and us too when Father died.
    Lizzie and Alice were easy children and good. Lizzie was very religious. Alice was patient and took the way of least resistance always. Dick too was good enough, but I was rebellious. Little Dick and I got the riding whip every day. It was a swishy whip and cut and curled around our black stockinged legs very hurtfully.
    The most particular sin for which we were whipped was called insubordination. Most always it arose from the same cause—remittance men, or remittance men’s wives. Canada was infested at that time by Old Country younger sons and ne’er-do-wells, people who had been shipped to Canada on a one-way ticket. These people lived on small remittances received from home. They were too lazy and too incompetent to work, stuck up, indolent, considering it beneath their dignity to earn but not beneath their dignity to take all a Canadian was willing to hand out.
    My two elder sisters were born in England. The one who ruled us felt very much “first born” in the English way, feeling herself better than the rest of us because she was oldest. She was proud of being top. She listened to all the hard-luck stories of the remittance people and said, “I too was born in