“What are you doing here?” she asked, her voice quivering, for she was in a regular rage.
“I am just taking our kittens away,” I said, gathering them up in my apron.
“Such alley-cats that go into other folks’ houses—it would serve them right if they had their heads chopped off,” said Teresa. “And such gad-about children, too,” she shouted down the ladder after me. “Children that grow up to be nothing but nuisances to other folks.”
Well, later came the time that I planned the surprise for Clockmaker Krause. One moonlight night he was walking up and down the street as usual. Karen and I went past him again and again and curtsied every time, but he looked only at the moon. Then we took a great notion to play some joke on him; and do you know what we did?
The clocks in his shop had struck seven almost at one and the same instant. Some boomed slowly in deep muffled tones, some rang delicate quick strokes. It sounded like chimes when all his clocks were striking.
The clockmaker had just gone away from his steps, and we knew that there was no one in the shop when he took these little walks.
“I’m going to run in and move the hands of all the clocks around to eight,” said I. “So the next time Krause comes to his shop door, they will strike again. My! What a surprise it will be for him, won’t it?”
Karen was to stand outside and whistle through her fingers if Krause came down the street sooner than we expected.
I dashed up the high flight of stone steps into the shop and shoved the hands quickly around on five clocks. Just then Karen whistled furiously through her fingers—right under the window—and I heard Krause on the stone steps.