see how his sister was
getting along in her new house, and to please him Bertha went with him.
The transposition of the McArdles, like most charitable enterprises, had
not been entirely a success. The children had blubbered at being torn
away from their playmates and the alleys and runways which they
infested. They were like lusty rats suddenly let loose in a fine new
barn with no dark corners, no burrows, no rotten planks, chips, or
coal-heaps to dig into or hide beneath. The alleys in Glenwood were
leafy lanes, the streets parked and concreted, and the school-yard
unnaturally clean and shaded by fine young trees--which no one was
allowed to climb.

Furthermore, there was work to do in the garden--and this was onerous to
the boys. Then, too, they had to fight their battles all over again.
However, they did this with pleasure, establishing dreadful reputations
among the neat, knickerbocker "sissies" who were foolish enough to cross
them. Dress, Mrs. McArdle declared, was now a real trial. The girls had
to be "in trim all the time," and the boys were as violently in contrast
to their fellows as a litter of brindle barn-kits beside a well-groomed
tabby-cat's family. "I'm clean worn out with it, Mart," she confessed.
"We've been here two weeks the day, and the children howlin' the whole
time to go back and McArdle workin' himself to the figger of a spoon
with a mind to polish the lawn and get the garden into seed."

But Mart only smiled. "'Tis good discipline, Fan."

Haney senior was delighted with his daughter's household. "Faith, the
roar and tumble of the whelps brings back to me me own wife and childer.
Them was good days. 'Twas hard skirmishin' some weeks for bacon and
p'taties, but I got 'em someway, and you ate ivery flick of it--snappin'
and snarlin', but happy as a box of pups."

His son and daughter looked at each other and laughed; then Mart said:
"'Tis a sad memory the father has, a most inconvenient and embarrassing
mind."

They all stayed to dinner, and Bertha rolled up her sleeves and helped
in the kitchen while the Captain went to market with Lucius. McArdle
having got a half-day off, came home highly wrought up again at thought
of meeting Captain Haney and his handsome wife. He looked distinctly
less care-worn, though he confessed that it was hard to rise at the hour
necessary to reach his work at seven. Bertha's heart warmed to him. In a
certain dreamy, speculative turn of eye he was like her father