all those
children."

Pony was standing out on the porch with his five sisters, and when he
looked in through the door, and saw his mother with her head thrown back
laughing, and her face flushed from standing over the stove to cook the
supper, and her brown hair tossed a little, he did think that she was very
nice looking, and like the girls at school that were in the fourth reader;
and she was very nicely dressed, too, in a white muslin dress, with the
blue check apron she had been working in flung behind the kitchen door,
as she came into the sitting-room carrying the dish in one hand. He did
not know what the other mother meant by saying "all those children"; for
it was a small family for the Boy's Town, and he thought she must just be
fooling.

Sometimes his mother would romp with the children, or sing them funny,
old-fashioned songs, such as people used to sing when the country was
first settled and everybody lived in log cabins. When she got into one of
her joking times she would call Pony "Honey! Honey!" like the old colored
aunty that had the persimmon-tree in her yard; and if she had to go past
him she would wind her arm around his head and mumble the top of it with
her lips; and if there were any of the fellows there, and Pony would fling
her arm away because he hated to have her do it before them, she would
just laugh.

Of course, if she had been a good mother about everything else Pony would
not have minded that, but she was such a very bad mother about letting him
have fun, sometimes, that Pony could not overlook it, as he might have
done. He did not think that she ought to call him Pony before the boys,
for, though he did not mind the boys' calling him Pony, it was not the
thing for a fellow's mother, and it was sure to give them the notion she
babied him at home. Once, after she called him "Pony, dear!" the fellows
mocked her when they got away, and all of them called him "Pony, dear!"
till he began to cry and to stone them.

But the worst of her ways was about powder, and her not wanting him to
have it, or not wanting him to have it where there was fire. She would
never let him come near the stove with it, after one of the fellows had
tried to dry his powder on the stove when it had got wet from being pumped
on in his jacket-pocket while he was drinking at the pump, and the fellow
forgot to take it off the stove quick enough, and it almost blew his
mother up, and did pretty nearly scare her to death