"Why, Chinky?"
"Because anybody'd think you was in a store picking out chairs to take home the way you try 'em all. Which are you going to keep?"
"All of 'em, like enough, since you're so bright," admitted the woman, laughing softly as she rocked. "And now say, you get to work and no more fooling. We'll make a bonfire of that tree. That poor man to be coming home from town this noon, and no family here to meet him and no dinner ready. Come, Chinky, fly around and we'll get his dinner, pudding and all before we leave. What if we was all dead and 'twas your pa?"
Mr. Hodgkins was surprised and pleased when he reached home. Not for years had any one taken the least interest in him. With the coming of the Mulvaneys he began to realize what he had missed. It was pleasant to be on friendly terms with one's neighbours. He was glad the children liked to visit him. They were good children, too; never made him any trouble and were always well behaved. He wondered why Sally Brown had called them quarrelsome, and why she had said Mrs. Mulvaney was cross.
Mr. Hodgkins never saw the little shanty in the city down by the railroad-tracks and the river, where the seven children were packed in like sardines. He never knew how hard was Mrs. Mulvaney's life when she washed clothes from morning until night, merely to keep the seven from starving, so of course he didn't realize that after a few months in the country, a great change had come over the family. At last they were folks.
While Mr. Hodgkins ate his dinner that day, the Mulvaneys gathered for the first time in their lives around a tablecloth, and if the cloth happened to be one of the new sheets folded in half what difference did it make?
"We've got to begin to practise putting on style without losing no more time," declared Mrs. Mulvaney, "and, Chinky, you tell Hannah to ask Sally Brown to come over first chance she gets, and show you young ones table manners. You've got to learn 'em. I may want to ask company in to tea before long, and we don't want no pigs to the table. Watch out, there, Stubbins, you've got your elbow in the butter. If you want something you can't reach, don't climb up on the table after it, that ain't manners. Take your fork and reach over for it this way, do you see?"
"Thay, ma, what if I wath after thyrup! Th'pothe I could hook into that with a fork? Oh, ouw, oh, thay, don't thlap me again. Oh, ouw, thay! I'll be good, I'll be good!"