of a play, though to
the twins to lie there in a bed of nettles with their eyes full of hot
cotton and their throats full of pepper, and the air full of people
making up dreadful faces at them, all with sore eyes and horrid red
noses.

So there they lay in the cradle while a blue-bottle-fly buzzed shrilly
from a dark corner where a fat gray spider had tied him up by his feet
and was sharpening her bill ready to make chops of him.

The milkman whopped at the back gate; the cracked school-bell around
the corner rang out long and loud; somewhere a carpenter was pounding
stroke upon stroke; and, as a background, beneath all came up the heavy
grinding roll of wheels and the clashing beat of hoofs upon the rough
pavement.

The tall brass clock ticked and ticked and held up its hands in solemn
surprise at finding it was only ten o'clock after all. Why! it seemed
already as long as a whole day since the bell on the First Baptist
church had struck nine.

Then Lily began to cry with a gentle little noise, about as though a
humming-bird was fluttering his wings against the cup of a
trumpet-flower.

"What is the matter, Lily?" asked Davie, feebly. "What you crying for?"

What was the _matter_? What _wasn't_ the matter, one would think!

But Lily only whimpered, "I want the cat."

"I'll get her for you, Lily," said Davie, trying to fumble his blind
way out of the cradle and start in search of her.

Fortunately for the ending of the story, somebody was in the room and
was ready to pick Davie up when his weak little legs suddenly doubled
up like a pocket-knife and dropped him on the nursery floor. So,
though Lily did not get the cat, neither did Davie get, what Aunt Ann
called "his death o' cold."

In due time, the measles turned and went their way wandering off around
after other children, one generation and then another. Lily's cat
lived out her nine lives and then turned into sage and catnip in the
back garden.

And now, after a long, long while, Davie and Lily have a birthday. Not
the next one, nor the second, nor the third, nor, if the truth must be
told, the fiftieth. But a birthday that came running to meet them with
glasses on and a flourishing of the almond-tree.

This time the twins' birthday is not kept in the gray old mansion, with
the shop below and the garden behind, where Aunt Ann rattled her keys
and lived out her bustling life. Nor does Aunt Ann come to help keep
it. Her hands have long been f