Into the Four-Story Mistake, an odd-looking house with a confused architectural history, move the Melendy family -- Mona, Rush, Randy, Oliver, Father, and Cuffy, the housekeeper. Though disappointed about leaving their old brownstone in New York City, and apprehensive about living the country life, the four Melendy kids soon settle into this unusual new home. Here, they become absorbed in the adventures of the country, adjusting themselves with all their accustomed resourcefulness and discovering the many hidden attractions that the Four-Story Mistake has to offer. The Four-Story Mistake is the second installment of Enright's Melendy Quartet, an engaging and warm series about the close-knit Melendy family and their surprising adventures. “The Melendys are the quintessential storybook family...[their] ardent approach to living is eternally relevant.” ― Publishers Weekly Elizabeth Enright (1907-1968) was born in Oak Park, Illinois, but spent most of her life in or near New York City. Her mother was a magazine illustrator, while her father was a political cartoonist. Illustration was Enright's original career choice and she studied art in Greenwich, Connecticut; Paris, France; and New York City. After creating her first book in 1935, she developed a taste, and quickly demonstrated a talent, for writing.  Throughout her life, she won many awards, including the 1939 John Newbery Medal for Thimble Summer and a 1958 Newbery Honor for Gone-Away Lake. Among her other beloved titles are her books about the Melendy family, including The Saturdays , published in 1941. Enright also wrote short stories for adults, and her work was published in The New Yorker , The Ladies Home Journal , Cosmopolitan , The Yale Review , Harper’s , and The Saturday Evening Post . She taught creative writing at Barnard College. Translated into many languages throughout the world, Elizabeth Enright's stories are for both the young and the young at heart. The Four-Story Mistake By Elizabeth Enright Macmillan Copyright © 1970 Nicholas W. Gillham, Robert Gillham II, and Oliver Gillham All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-312-37599-7 Contents Title Page, Copyright Notice, Dedication, Introduction, I. The Last Time and the First, II. A View Apiece, III. Ali-Baba Oliver, IV. The Back of the Bus, V. Rock-a-bye Rush, VI. Clarinda, 1869, VII. The Show, VIII. Noël, Noël, IX. The Light in the Woods, X. The Caddis House, XI. Addition and Subtraction, XII. "Oh, Summer Night!", About the Author, The Melendy Quartet, Copyright, CHAPTER 1 The Last Time and the First "Well, thank goodness there aren't going to be any more children here anyway!" said Randy crossly. She spoke crossly because she was sad and she preferred sounding cross to sounding sorrowful, even though there was no one in the room except herself. Nobody and nothing, for that matter: her words had the particular ringing echo that is heard only in entirely empty rooms. Almost all her life Randy had shared this room with her older sister, Mona, and today they were going to go away and leave it. Forever. She looked carefully around because it is important to see clearly when one looks at something for the last time. How strange it seemed with all the furniture gone: smaller, somehow. In the long window the scarred shade hung crookedly as it always had; for hundreds and hundreds of nights its gentle flapping had been the last sound she heard before she slept. Good-bye, shade, thought Randy sentimentally. Above the place where her bed had been some of her own drawings remained because she had impulsively stuck them to the wallpaper with glue when she couldn't find the thumbtacks. Cuffy had given her a good scolding for that, all right! Good-bye, pictures, thought Randy. She didn't mind leaving the pictures so much; she could make thousands of better ones any time she felt like it. She looked at the darker rectangles on the paper where other pictures had hung, and the stain on the baseboard where Mona had spilled the iodine that time. Randy sighed a loud, echoing sigh. Downstairs in Rush's room she could hear the voices of Rush and Mona, and a lot of scraping and thumping and banging as they tried to get a suitcase closed. "Doggone thing acts like it hates me!" she heard Rush complain bitterly. "Be reasonable," said Mona in her most maddening voice. "You can't expect anything to absorb seven times its own capacity. Why don't you take something out?" "I suppose I could carry the Ninth Symphony, and the B Minor Concerto, and the roller skates myself. They don't seem to give much." Randy sighed again and went out of the room for the last time. The last time: she'd been saying that to herself all day. She had paid a farewell visit to every single room in the house from the Office, which had been the Melendy children's playroom, to the furnace room in the basement. All of them looked bare and cold and friendless. That morning the moving men had