Mattie snuggles into her pillow again, hoping to “float back to sleep, drifting like Blanchard’s giant yellow balloon.” However, when a mosquito bites her on the forehead, she leaps out of bed and cracks her head on the low, sloped ceiling. Mattie is used to hearing that her mother was “a perfect girl,” “utterly unlike me.” As her mother goes down the stairs, Mattie hears her muttering about how much harder she worked when she was Mattie’s age.
She continues shaking Mattie out of bed, saying that Polly, their servant, is late, and there is much work to doĪlready sweating, Mattie observes that it’s going to be another hot August day. Matilda “Mattie” Cook wakes to the sound of a mosquito whining in one ear and her mother, Lucille Cook, “screeching” in the other: “Rouse yourself this instant!” Her mother opens the shutters in Mattie’s small room above the family coffeehouse. Mattie yearns to one day break free of the ties that bind her to her tawdry life, just like that "remarkable balloon" that had risen from the prison courtyard, escaping the confines of earth. A few blocks south of that lies the Walnut Street Prison it was there where the French aeronaut Jean Pierre Blanchard had recently launched the first hot-air balloon flown in the United States. Mattie herself does not like the blacksmith's shop, with its "roaring furnace sparks crackling in the air." She prefers the waterfront which lies to the east on a clear day, she can see the masts of the ships tied up at the wharves on the Delaware River from her window. As she leans out the window which overlooks the teeming Philadelphia street below to dispose of the dead rodent, Mattie hears the sound of the blacksmith's hammer on his anvil and conjectures that Polly is probably late because she has stopped to visit with Matthew, the blacksmith's son. As Mattie dresses, Silas, the family cat, pounces on a mouse and the girl, shooing the angry feline away, retrieves the rodent, now deceased. Polly, the serving girl who helps at the coffeehouse downstairs, is late and there is work to be done. The weather is stifling and a mosquito buzzes annoyingly around her head as she sluggishly responds to her parent's nagging. Print Print document PDF list Cite link Linkįourteen-year-old Mattie Cook is roused abruptly by her mother on the morning of August 16, 1793.
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