"Goosey!" cried Ernest, in great disdain. "I'll show you!" and he
led Roderick, with his sucker, right into the best parlour, where the
fireplace was, and showed him an awful thing.

Of course, to the ordinary observer, there was nothing awful about the
fireplace. Everything in the way of bric-a-brac possessed by the Santa
Maria flatters was artistic. It may have been in the Lease that only
people with esthetic tastes were to be admitted to the apartments.
However that may be, the fireplace, with its vases and pictures and
trinkets, was something quite wonderful. Indian incense burned in a
mysterious little dish, pictures of purple ladies were hung in odd
corners, calendars in letters nobody could read, served to decorate,
if not to educate, and glass vases of strange colours and extraordinary
shapes stood about filled with roses. None of these things were awful.
At least no one would have dared say they were. But what was awful was
the formation of the grate. It was not a hospitable place with andirons,
where noble logs of wood could be laid for the burning, nor did it have
a generous iron basket where honest anthracite could glow away into the
nights. Not a bit of it. It held a vertical plate of stuff that looked
like dirty cotton wool, on which a tiny blue flame leaped when the gas
was turned on and ignited.

"You can see for yourself!" said Ernest tragically.

Roderick could see for himself. There was an inch-wide opening down
which the Friend of the Children could squeeze himself, and, as
everybody knows, he needs a good deal of room now, for he has grown
portly with age, and his pack every year becomes bigger, owing to the
ever-increasing number of girls and boys he has to supply

"Gimini!" said Roderick, and dropped his all-day sucker on the
old Bokara rug that Ernest's mamma had bought the week before at a
fashionable furnishing shop, and which had given the sore throat to all
the family, owing to some cunning little germs that had come over with
the rug to see what American throats were like.

Oh, me, yes! but Roderick could see! Anybody could see! And a boy could
see better than anybody.

"Let's go see the Telephone Boy," said Roderick. This seemed the wisest
thing to do. When in doubt, all the children went to the Telephone
Boy, who was the most fascinating person, with knowledge of the most
wonderful kind and of a nature to throw that of Mrs. Scheherazade quite,
quite in the shade--which, considering