“Oh! I don’t object to those either. Let’s put them on behind the pretty ones; and maybe they’ll not have to scrub floors or make bread, the sweet darlings,” answered the wife, when soon after the babies’ birth the important matter of naming them arose.
At the moment when the father and Molly were watching the storm from one small window, while the three Jays and Sarah Jane occupied the other, these youngest members of the big family were seated upon a gray blanket behind the stove. They had been placed there by their careful mother, as a safeguard against cold and exposure, and in dangerous proximity to a pan of bread dough which had been set to rise. It was due to the excitement of the storm that, for once, their mother forgot them; and it was not till she called, “All hands round!” and the family filed into place about the big table that she remembered them; or, rather, had her attention called to them by Sarah Jane, the caretaker of the household.
“Oh! mother Johns! the twins! the twins!”
“Bless me! the twins, indeed! the bread-maker’s beginning early, Mary wife!” laughed the plumber.
“Oh! oh! oh! you naughty dears! You naughty, naughty dears! To think that great big girls, almost two years old, should waste mother’s nice dough like that!”
The pair had plunged their fat little arms deep in the soft, yielding mass and plucked handfuls of it, to smear upon each other’s faces and curls; and what remained in the raiser had been plentifully dotted with bits of coal from the near-by hod. They looked so funny, and were themselves so hilarious with glee over their own mischief, that there was nothing left for their elders to do except join in the general merriment.
But Mrs. Johns’ face sobered soon.
“It’s a pity, it’s a pity. All that good bread gone to do nobody any good, when there are so many hungry people will be needing food before this storm’s over. And we almost out of flour, too.”
“Seems to me we’re almost always out of flour—or shoes!” laughed the father. “And it’s a blessing, that, so long as I’ve the money to pay for either. There wouldn’t be empty flour buckets if there weren’t healthy appetites in the house; and shoes wouldn’t wear out if the feet inside them weren’t active and strong.”
“Hm’m. I’d like a chance to save a cent, now and then. What if your own health should fail, or you lose your job? And I’ve been wanting a set of cheap, pretty lace curtains to the front-room windows ever since I could remember. All the neighbors have them, but we never can.”