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At lazy, lousy, Lizy Jane.
Ida was delighted, and so were the others. Mary Power said, “I told you Laura could do it.” At that moment Miss Wilder rang the bell. The whole recess had gone, as quickly as that.
The boys came in, making all the noise they could, and as Charley passed by and caught sight of the slate, Ida laughed and let him take it.
“Oh, no!” Laura cried in a whisper, but she was too late. Until noon the boys were slipping that slate from one to another, and Laura feared that Miss Wilder would capture it, with Ida’s drawing and her handwriting on it. Laura breathed a great sigh of relief when the slate came slipping back, and Ida quickly cleaned it with her slate-rag.
When they all went out to the crisp, sunny outdoors to go home for dinner, Laura heard the boys chanting all along the road to Main Street,
“Going to school is lots of fun,
From laughing we have gained a ton,
We laugh until we have a pain,
At LAZY, LOUSY, LIZY JANE!”
Laura gasped. She felt sick for a minute. She cried out. “They mustn’t! We must stop them. Oh, Mary Power, Minnie, come on, hurry.” She called, “Boys! Charley! Clarence!”
“They don’t hear you,” Minnie said. “We couldn’t stop them, anyway.”
Already the boys were separating at Main Street. They were only talking, but Laura had no more than sighed in relief when one began to chant again, and others joined in. “Going to school is lots of fun—” Both up and down Main Street they yelled,
“LAZY, LOUSY, LIZY JANE!”
“Oh, why haven’t they better sense!” Laura said.
“Laura,” said Mary Power, “there’s just one thing to do. Don’t tell who wrote that. Ida won’t, I know. I won’t, and Minnie won’t, will you, Minnie?”
“Cross my heart,” Minnie promised. “But what about Nellie Oleson?”
“She doesn’t know. She was talking with Miss Wilder, the whole recess,” Mary Power reminded them. “And you’ll never tell, will you, Laura?”
“Not unless Pa or Ma asks me, straight out,” said Laura.
“Likely they won’t think to, and then nobody will ever know,” Mary Power tried to comfort Laura.
While they were eating dinner, Charley and Clarence passed by, chanting that frightful verse, and Pa said, “That sounds like some song I don’t know. You ever hear a song before about lazy, lousy, Lizy Jane?”
“I never did,” said Ma. “It doesn’t sound like a nice song.”
Laura did not say a word. She thought she had never been so miserable.
Around the schoolhouse the boys were chanting that verse. Nellie’s brother Willie was with them. Inside the schoolhouse Ida and Nellie were standing at the window farthest from Miss Wilder. She must have known that Nellie had told.
Nellie was furious. She wanted to know who had written that verse, but Ida had not told her and none of the others would. No doubt her brother Willie knew or would find out. He would tell her and then she would tell Miss Wilder.
After school that night, and again on Saturday, the boys could be heard chanting those words. In the bright, clear weather they were all outdoors. Laura could almost have welcomed a blizzard to shut them in. She had never felt so ashamed, for she had spread Nellie’s mean tattle-telling farther than Nellie ever could have. She blamed herself, yet she still blamed Miss Wilder far more. If Miss Wilder had been only decently fair to Carrie, Laura never could have got into such trouble.
That afternoon Mary Power came to visit. Often on Saturday afternoons she and Laura visited and worked together.
They sat in the pleasant, sunny, front room.
Laura was crocheting a nubia of soft white wool, for Mary’s Christmas present in college, and Mary Power was knitting a silk necktie for her father’s Christmas. Ma rocked and knitted, or sometimes read interesting bits to them from the church paper, The Advance. Grace played about, and Carrie sewed a nine-patch quilt block.
Those were such pleasant afternoons. The winter sunshine streamed in. The room was pleasantly warm from the coal heater. Kitty, grown now to a cat, stretched and lazily purred in the sunshine on the rag rug, or curved purring against the front door, asking with a mrrreow to be let out to watch for dogs.
Kitty had become famous in town. She was such a pretty cat, such a clean blue and white, with slender body and long tail, that everyone wanted to pet her. But she was a one-family cat. Only the family could touch her. When anyone else stooped to stroke her, she flew snarling and clawing into his face. Usually someone screeched, “Don’t touch that cat!” in time to save him.
