"
"Then I want to go," decided Phronsie. "I do so want to see that white
needle, Polly."
"Well, eat your breakfast," said Polly, "because you know we all have
ever so much to do to-day to get off."
"Yes, I will," declared Phronsie, attacking her cold chicken and roll
with great vigour.
"It seems as if the whole world were at Zermatt," said the parson,
looking out from the big piazza crowded with the hotel people, out to
the road in front, with every imaginable tourist passing and repassing.
Donkeys were being driven up, either loaded down to their utmost with
heavy bags and trunks, or else waiting to receive on their patient
backs the heavier people. Phronsie never could see the poor animals,
without such distress coming in her face that every one in the party
considered it his or her bounden duty to comfort and reassure her. So
this time it was Tom's turn to do so.
"Oh, don't you worry," he said, looking down into her troubled little
face where he sat on the piazza railing swinging his long legs, "they
like it, those donkeys do!"
"Do they?" asked Phronsie, doubtfully.
"Yes, indeed," said Tom, with a gusto, as if he wished he were a
donkey, and in just that very spot, "it gives them a chance to see
things, and to hear things, too, don't you know?" went on Tom, at his
wits' end to know how he was going to come out of his sentences.
"Oh," said Phronsie, yet she sighed as she saw the extremely fat person
just being hauled up to a position on a very small donkey's back.
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