“Why yes, plenty, Aunt Fanny; dessert too—flower-pot pudding.”
“Flower-pot pudding! who ever heard of such a pudding! Is it any thing like dirt-pies?”
“Why no, Aunt Fanny!” cried all the children; “it is cooked in flower-pots; at any rate, we call them so; but there are no holes in the bottoms of them. Mamma brought ever so many of these funny little brown earthen pots from Boston. The cook puts them in the oven only half full of the pudding, but when they come out, oh my! how funny they look! for each one has swelled up twice as high as the pot, and some of them hang over on one side, as if they were perfectly tipsy; and when you come to cut them, pop! goes the knife into a great hole inside, and there’s where you must put the sauce, and that makes them taste so nice! but—why do you ask?”
Aunt Fanny laughed, and said—
“When you came at me so furiously, I thought you might have been living on a slice or two of buttered paper and a teacup or so of sunbeams to-day, and meant to eat me up for supper.”
“Oh, Aunt Fanny! we love you dearly, but we wouldn’t eat you up for all the world.”
“But what’s that sticking out of your pocket?” asked Sophie, spying the end of the roll of manuscript, for the first time.
“A Pop-gun. Bang!” she answered, pulling it out and pointing it at them. “Come, sit down, for I have brought it on purpose to read to you.”
With a great many “hushes,” and flourishes, and skirmishes, to get the seats on either side of her, Aunt Fanny unrolled her story, and began as follows: