eptember day would be so long? Or that the old
clock in the hall would go so ridiculously slow? There was a quiet
jocularity in the motion of its long pendulum, as if it were laughing
bitterly that anyone could be in a hurry. "Ha! ha! ha!" ticked the
clock.

"Oh, dear!" Hannah said with a sigh, "will it never be three?"

How they kept their ears open to hear a crowd of men come stumbling up
the stone steps with the weight of the piano!

"Perhaps it is already here," Liseke said, faintly.

"Perhaps it's coming," Hannah suggested, hopefully.

"One--two--three--," the clock struck.

"Come, mamma!" the children cried; and so they opened the sitting-room
door with trembling hands.

Nobody there; nothing there. Mamma sat down in a corner and began
knitting, while the children looked out of the window into the narrow
street to see a wagon drive up to the house.

"Perhaps they've forgotten all about it," Liseke was saying tremulously,
when the sitting-room door burst open and there stood Max and behind
him, papa Karl.

"Oh, Max, Max, where's the surprise?" the children implored.

"Why, don't you see!" Max cried, mightily injured, and turning himself
about disclosed his small person arrayed in a new velveteen suit
brilliant with brass buttons.

"Oh--dear--dear," sobbed little Hannah with the tears rolling down, "we
thought it was a piano!'

"Did I say it was a piano?" Max howled.

"You said it--it--was--was--covered with pl--plush," Liseke sobbed.

"Well, isn't it?"

"And--and you said it 'ud make a noise if one b--banged on it," Hannah
cried, piteously.

"Well, see if it don't!" Max shrieked, when papa Karl's hand came down
upon him with such superb effect there was no doubting the truth of the
assertion.

"Ungrateful children, you are never satisfied," papa Karl cried
majestically. "No matter what I do for you, you're always ungrateful--"

[Illustration: THE SHAMEFULLY NEGLECTED SIX.]

"But Karl," mamma Betty interrupted, with quiet decision, in the midst
of a storm of sobs, "you can't expect the children to be very much
delighted because Max gets a new suit--something necessary."

"And it's so tight I can't breathe," Max cried, goaded to frenzy by the
general grief.

"Ingrates!" gasped papa Karl, and strode up and down the room, while
Liseke sobbed her grief out on mamma's shoulder, and Max hid his face in
her lap, and Hannah was bravely trying to dry her brown eyes.

"Karl, they are children,