“Talk ter somebody ’tain’t so busy as I be, then! I’ve got about forty hundred things ter do this very day, an’ here it is goin’ on ten o’clock, a’ready.”
“What ‘forty hundered’ things, Rosetta? Paula says that you zaggerate turribly. I don’t know ezactly what zaggerate means, but I’m afraid it is somethin’ like tellin’ a lie. You wouldn’t tell a lie, would you, Rosetta?” responded the little boy, in a tone that revealed his distress over Rosetta’s danger.
“Here, if ye hev sunthin’ ter do ye won’t ast so many foolish questions. Take this bowl of raisins an’ set down an’ stun ’em.”
That was labor wholly congenial to Fritzy’s temper, or he fancied that it would be, and he obediently took the bowl and dropped upon the floor to “help Rosetta,” as he had occasionally been allowed to do before.
The good woman was indeed very busy. She was a famous cook, but in all the time he had been at The Snuggery, Fritz had never smelled so many and such savory odors as permeated her kitchen at that moment. In the great Dutch oven, from “the hole in the wall,” as he called it, there came whiffs of perfume suggesting to the chronically hungry child the delights of roasting fowls, and even the unusual but never-to-be-forgotten fragrance of a “little piggy cookin’ whole.”
The range oven was full of pies, the shelves of the pantry were laden with cakes and jellies, and even the little oil-stove was pressed into service to bake tin after tin of puffy looking biscuits. Fritz didn’t understand it at all. And when he had asked Content why every one was “tearin’ around as if they was possessed so for,” she had answered him with honest sympathy:—
“I haven’t the least idea in the world, dearie. It seems as if grandmother must be expecting a lot of company; for even we couldn’t eat half the stuff Rosetta is preparing. I asked Aunt Ruth if any one was coming, and she told me to ‘watch out sharp and see.’ I knew then that I was to ask no more questions; but I do hope we shall have a taste of all the nice things; don’t you?”
“Don’t I?” responded Fritz; and with that hope in mind he had invaded the kitchen.
Rosetta at last bethought herself that the child was unusually quiet, and paused in her vigorous thumping of the bread dough to look behind her toward his corner. There was a goodly pile of sticky seeds upon her polished floor; the bowl of raisins had become a bowl of emptiness; but in the basin which should have been filled, to make all the terms of the problem satisfactory, there were but a few torn and scraggy bits of fruit.
“Fritzy Pickel! What in the name o’ common-sense! Where hev ye put them raisins?”