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Main > Fairy tale > All authors > Frank Baum > Fairy tale "Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work"

Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work

Moreover, Elmhurst was the one important estate in

the county, and the simple, hard-working farmers in its vicinity

considered, justly enough, that the owner was wholly out of their class.

This was not the owner's fault, and Kenneth had brooded upon the matter

until he had come to regard it as a distinct misfortune. For it isolated

him and deprived him of any social intercourse with his neighbors.

The boy had come to live at Elmhurst when he was a mere child, but only

as a dependent upon the charities of Aunt Jane, who had accepted the

charge of the orphan because he was a nephew of her dead lover, who had

bequeathed her his estate of Elmhurst. Aunt Jane was Kenneth's aunt

merely in name, since she had never even married the uncle to whom she

had been betrothed, and who had been killed in an accident before the

boy was born.

She was an irritable old woman, as Kenneth knew her, and had never shown

him any love or consideration. He grew up in a secluded corner of the

great house, tended merely by servants and suffered to play in those

quarters of the ample grounds which Aunt Jane did not herself visit. The

neglect which Kenneth had suffered and his lonely life had influenced

the youth's temperament, and he was far from being an agreeable

companion at the time Aunt Jane summoned her three nieces to Elmhurst in

order to choose one of them as her heiress. These girls, bright, cheery

and wholesome as they were, penetrated the boy's reserve and drew him

out of his misanthropic moods. They discovered that he had remarkable

talent as an artist, and encouraged him to draw and paint, something he

had long loved to do in secret.

Then came the great surprise of the boy's life, which changed his

condition from one of dependency into affluence. Aunt Jane died and it

was discovered that she had no right to transfer the estate to one of

her nieces, because by the terms of his uncle's deed to her the property

reverted on her death to Kenneth himself. Louise Merrick, Beth DeGraf

and Patsy Doyle, the three nieces, were really glad that the boy

inherited Elmhurst, and returned to their eastern homes with the most

cordial friendship existing between them all.

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