The Corner House Girls on a Tour Where they went, what they saw, and what they found — A Reader’s Guide

(10 User reviews) 1756

In Category - Fantasy Juvenile Worlds

Authors: Hill, Grace Brooks, Owen, Robert Emmett, 1878-1957 [Illustrator] Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2011 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Sisters -- Juvenile fiction; Automobile travel -- Juvenile fiction; Families -- Juvenile fiction; School children -- Juvenile fiction; Romanies -- Juvenile fiction; Traveling sales personnel -- Juvenile fiction Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 58,655

Reading time 256 min

Text sections 7

The Corner House Girls on a Tour Where they went, what they saw, and what they found — A Reader’s Guide can be approached with a clearer sense of reading commitment from its source measurements: 58,655 words, 4 hr 16 min estimated reading time, and 7 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 12.3 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Sisters -- Juvenile fiction,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #36251

This editorial note examines the structure and imagery in Grace Brooks Hill's 1917 novel, focusing on the Kenway sisters' automobile tour, the recurring motif of food and hunger, and the movement between domestic and wild spaces, as seen in excerpts from the first chapter and later scenes.

Editorial Edition Score 4.7/5

★★★★★ ★★★★★

Calculated from edition completeness, EPUB availability, text structure and catalogue metadata. Not a user rating.

How this score is calculated

Description quality20 pts
Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

Total of 100 points, scaled to a 2.5-5.0 range. Editions with an empty description or a missing EPUB file are not scored.

Edition quality

File: pg36251

Read the Text

e and a twittering like an eager flock of sparrows in the big kitchen of the old Corner House, which stood facing Main Street in Milton, but with its long side and rear yard and garden running far back on Willow Street.

The four Kenway girls had the room all to themselves at this early hour on Saturday morning, for Mrs. MacCall and Aunt Sarah Maltby had not yet come downstairs, while Linda, the maid, had deserted the kitchen and pantry altogether for the time being.

Ruth, the eldest and most sedate of the sisters, was filling sandwiches at the dresser—and such a variety as there was of them!

Chicken, with mayonnaise and a lettuce leaf; pink ham cut thin and decorated with little golden dabs of mustard; peanut butter sandwiches; nut and cheese sandwiches, the filling nestling in a salad leaf, too; tuna fish, with narrow slices of red, red Spanish peppers decorating it; and of course sardines, carefully split and laid between soda crackers. What picnic lunch would be complete without sardines?

Agnes, the next oldest to Ruth and the beauty of the family, was slicing bread as exactly as though it were a problem in geometry and in such quantity that Tess declared it looked as though they were to feed an army.

Tess herself was seriously attending to the boiling of two dozen eggs in a big saucepan.

“Though why you need to watch ’em so closely I can’t see,” complained Agnes. “There are other things you might be doing when there is so _much_ to do—goodness knows! Those eggs won’t get away.”

“No,” joined in Dot, the youngest of the Corner House girls, and quite seriously, too. “No. It isn’t like boiling lobsters.”

“Right, Dottums,” chuckled Agnes, recovering from her vexation immediately. “Eggs are an entirely different kind of shellfish.”

“Well,” said the little girl, explaining, “Mrs. Adams boiled some raw lobsters the other day, and one hopped right out of the pot on to the floor and started for the door—it really did!”

“Oo-ee!” gasped Tess, attracted for a moment from the bobbing eggs by this statement. “The poor thing!”

“Who’s a poor thing—Mrs. Adams?” asked Ruth, laughing gayly.

“Why, no,” said Tess, who was nothing if not tender-hearted. “The lobster.”

“Goodness!” exclaimed Agnes. “Do you s’pose it hurts a lobster to be boiled?”

“_Why_ doesn’t it?” demanded Tess, promptly.

“’Cause it has a shell,” ventured Dot.

“Why—because they always _do_ boil them,” said Agnes, rather at a loss for an answer to Tess’ question.

“Sometimes they broil them,” said the oldest sister, smiling.

“Well, they’re used to it, anyway,” declared Agnes, with conviction.

“I—I don’t believe anybody could get used to being boiled,” observed Tess, slowly. “Look at Sammy Pinkney.”

“Where?” demanded Agnes, jumping. “I hope that horrid child isn’t coming over so early. I hoped we’d get away without having him around.”

“Oh, my!” murmured Dot. “You know he’s just got over the scarlet fever.”

“But he hasn’t got over being a nuisance,” declared the older girl.

“I didn’t mean that Sammy was really here—to look at,” explained the serious Tess. “I meant—I meant——”

“Well, what _did_ you mean?” asked Agnes, who was inclined to be impatient.

“She meant, ‘consider Sammy,’ didn’t you, Tessie?” suggested Ruth, kindly.

“Oh! Were you taking him for an example?” cried Agnes. “But Sammy hasn’t ever been boiled—although maybe he ought to have been.”

“No; he hasn’t been boiled,” said the serious Tess, still watching the eggs bobbing in the boiling water. “But he’s punished lots of times—at school, I mean. And he doesn’t seem to get used to it. He hollers just as loud now as the first time I ever heard him.”

“Did the lobster holler?” chuckled Agnes. “Did it, Dot?”

But Dot—who was not allowed to “mess in” with the lunch—had found another subject for consideration. She had been looking at Ruth, dexterously opening a second can of sardines. Now, when the cover was laid back and the oil drained off, the smallest girl pointed a dimpled finger at the contents of the can.

“What’s the matter, honey?” asked Ruth, smiling down at the serious face of the fairy-like Dot. “What is it?”

“Why, Ruthie,” said Dot, wonderingly, “I was only thinking if that middle fish wanted to turn over, what a lot of trouble it would have!”

Amid the laughter of the two older girls at this, the door banged open and a boy with a mop of flaxen hair—a regular “whitehead” and a football cut at that—burst into the room.

Continue Reading →

The Corner House Girls on a Tour opens with a kitchen scene of deliberate, almost ritualistic preparation: the four Kenway sisters fill sandwiches with precise variety—chicken, ham, peanut butter, tuna, sardines—while Tess watches eggs boil and Agnes slices bread with geometric exactness. This domestic bustle, described as “a twittering like an eager flock of sparrows,” establishes a baseline of order and abundance. Yet the novel’s structure repeatedly pulls the girls away from this safe interior into open roads, berry fields, and encounters with strangers. The movement between the Corner House kitchen and the wider landscape forms the book’s central rhythm, and the excerpts suggest that food—its presence, absence, or foraging—marks each shift in setting and mood.

From Kitchen to Road: The Opening as Blueprint

The first chapter, “A Red Letter Day Indeed,” does more than introduce characters. It establishes a pattern of domestic order that the tour will repeatedly disrupt. Ruth, Agnes, Tess, and Dot each have assigned tasks: sandwich-making, bread-slicing, egg-boiling. The catalog of fillings—mayonnaise, lettuce leaf, red Spanish peppers—reads like an inventory of control. Yet the very abundance hints at impending loss. Later, when Tess and Dot become lost, the question “How were two little girls, fast becoming ‘wild,’ to eat?” directly echoes the opening’s focus on provisioning. The structure thus frames the tour as a series of departures from and returns to food-centered stability.

Hunger and the Wild: Foraging as Plot Device

When Tess and Dot wander into a “great field, rocky and barren otherwise, but a fine berry pasture,” the narrative shifts from planned meals to improvisation. The girls pick blueberries “in handfuls” and “actually cramming them into their mouths.” Their stained fingers and lips, and the crushed berries on their frocks, mark a physical transition from civilized to wild. This foraging scene is not merely incidental; it repeats the novel’s concern with finding sustenance outside the Corner House. The berries appear just after Dot declares she is hungry, and the discovery of the Gypsy woman’s “orange and green petticoat” follows immediately. The structure links hunger, exploration, and encounter with the unfamiliar.

The Gypsy Woman and the Automobile: Intersecting Movements

The appearance of the Gypsy woman—described as “very brown, with great hoops of gold in her ears” and a “green and orange petticoat”—coincides with the passing of an automobile on the road. The narrative notes that Tess and Dot “must have heard the passing of an automobile” had Neale O’Neil blown the horn. This near-miss is structurally significant: the girls’ static, hidden encounter with the Romany folk contrasts with the moving vehicle carrying the older sisters. The tour itself is an automobile journey, yet the most vivid excerpted scene involves being lost on foot. The book thus juxtaposes two modes of travel—mechanized and pedestrian—and two kinds of seeing: the hurried view from a car and the intimate, accidental discovery of a campsite.

Night Search and the Limits of Rescue

The search for Tess and Dot introduces a darker tone. Men with lanterns and “’coon dogs” beat the woods, but the effort yields only a raccoon. Neale O’Neil returns at dawn, having heard “one thing that greatly troubled him.” The structure here withholds the clue, building suspense. The search party’s failure contrasts with the earlier, efficient kitchen work: domestic order cannot easily extend into the wild. The dogs, the lanterns, the “squalid little village” of Arbutusville—these details ground the adventure in a specific, gritty landscape. The night scene also isolates the younger girls further, as the narrative cuts between their berry-picking and the anxious adults, emphasizing the gap between those who search and those who are lost.

Readers attentive to the novel’s structure will notice how each chapter title—from “A Red Letter Day Indeed” to “Welcome Home”—marks a phase of departure, crisis, or return. The recurring image of food, from the opening sandwiches to the foraged berries, serves as a barometer of the girls’ safety and autonomy. The excerpts do not reveal the resolution of Tess and Dot’s adventure, but they show how Hill uses small, concrete details—a petticoat, a saucepan of eggs, a clump of blueberry bushes—to anchor the story’s movement between the familiar and the strange.

Reading about the Kenway sisters’ hunger on that long automobile tour, I remembered the rations we counted out during our own trip, tin cups clinking in the back seat. That same ache of wanting more than the map promised surfaced again in Kathie's Soldiers — A Closer Reading, where waiting felt like its own small meal.