ooked and affected to be. The impression I did receive
of her appearance I communicated to my mother in far from respectful
pantomime.

"Well, love, and what do you think of Mrs. Wood?" said she.

"I think," chanted I, in that high brassy pitch of voice which Jem and I
had adopted for this bravado period of our existence--"I think she's
like our old white hen that turned up its eyes and died of the pip.
Lack-a-daisy-dee! Lack-a-daisy-dee!"

And I twisted my body about, and strolled up and down the room with a
supposed travesty of Mrs. Wood's movements.

"So she is," said faithful Jem. "Lack-a-daisy-dee! Lack-a-daisy-dee!"
and he wriggled about after me, and knocked over the Berlin
wool-basket.

"Oh dear, oh dear!" said our poor mother.

Jem righted the basket, and I took a run and a flying leap over it, and
having cleared it successfully, took another, and yet another, each one
soothing my feelings to the extent by which it shocked my mother's. At
the third bound, Jem, not to be behindhand, uttered a piercing yell from
behind the sofa.

"Good gracious, what's the matter?" cried my mother.

"It's the war-whoop of the Objibeway Indians," I promptly explained, and
having emitted another, to which I flattered myself Jem's had been as
nothing for hideousness, we departed in file to raise a row in the
kitchen.

Summer passed into autumn. Jem and I really liked going to school, but
it was against our principles at that time to allow that we liked
anything that we ought to like.

Some sincere but mistaken efforts to improve our principles were made, I
remember, by a middle-aged single lady, who had known my mother in her
girlhood, and who was visiting her at this unlucky stage of our career.
Having failed to cope with us directly, she adopted the plan of talking
improvingly to our mother and at us, and very severe some of her
remarks were, and I don't believe that Mother liked them any better
than we did.

The severest she ever made were I think heightened in their severity by
the idea that we were paying unusual attention, as we sat on the floor a
little behind her one day. We were paying a great deal of attention, but
it was not so much to Miss Martin as to a stock of wood-lice which I had
collected, and which I was arranging on the carpet that Jem might see
how they roll themselves into smooth tight balls when you tease them.
But at last she talked so that we could not help attending. I dared not
say anything