beautiful. In November, of course, the flowers
were chrysanthemums, yellow and coppery coloured. Then there were always
sausages on toast for breakfast, and these are rapture, after six days
of Kentish Town Road eggs at fourteen a shilling.

On this particular Sunday there were fowls for dinner, a kind of food
that is generally kept for birthdays and grand occasions, and there
was an angel pudding, when rice and milk and oranges and white icing do
their best to make you happy.

After dinner father was very sleepy indeed, because he had been working
hard all the week; but he did not yield to the voice that said, 'Go and
have an hour's rest.' He nursed the Lamb, who had a horrid cough that
cook said was whooping-cough as sure as eggs, and he said--

'Come along, kiddies; I've got a ripping book from the library, called
The Golden Age, and I'll read it to you.'

Mother settled herself on the drawing-room sofa, and said she could
listen quite nicely with her eyes shut. The Lamb snugged into the
'armchair corner' of daddy's arm, and the others got into a happy heap
on the hearth-rug. At first, of course, there were too many feet and
knees and shoulders and elbows, but real comfort was actually settling
down on them, and the Phoenix and the carpet were put away on the back
top shelf of their minds (beautiful things that could be taken out and
played with later), when a surly solid knock came at the drawing-room
door. It opened an angry inch, and the cook's voice said, 'Please, m',
may I speak to you a moment?'

Mother looked at father with a desperate expression. Then she put her
pretty sparkly Sunday shoes down from the sofa, and stood up in them and
sighed.

'As good fish in the sea,' said father, cheerfully, and it was not till
much later that the children understood what he meant.

Mother went out into the passage, which is called 'the hall', where the
umbrella-stand is, and the picture of the 'Monarch of the Glen' in a
yellow shining frame, with brown spots on the Monarch from the damp
in the house before last, and there was cook, very red and damp in the
face, and with a clean apron tied on all crooked over the dirty one that
she had dished up those dear delightful chickens in. She stood there and
she seemed to get redder and damper, and she twisted the corner of her
apron round her fingers, and she said very shortly and fiercely--

'If you please ma'am, I should wish to leave at my day month.' Mother
leaned ag