Rebecca Mary

Rebecca Mary took another stitch. Then another. "Ninety-sevvun, ninety-eight," she counted aloud, her little pointed face gravely intent. She waited the briefest possible space before she took ninety-nine. It was getting very close to the Time now. "At the hundred an' oneth," Rebecca Mary whispered. "It's almost it." Her breath came quicker under her tight little dress. Between her thin, light eyebrows a crease deepened anxiously. "Ninety - n-i-n-e," she counted, "one hun-der-ed" - it was so very close now! The next stitch would be the hundred and oneth. Rebecca Mary's face suddenly grew quite white. "I'll wait a m-minute," she decided; "I'm just a little scared. When you've been lookin' head to the hundred and oneth so LONG and you get the very next door to it, it scares you a little. I'll wait until - oh, until Thomas Jefferson crows, before I sew the hundred and oneth."