Grandma Knight heard this remark, and she decided that it was about time for Joe to have a lesson. When the boy came in to supper, feeling very hungry after a good game of ball, there sat his grandmother knitting a stocking.
He glanced around the kitchen in surprise. "My stomach feels pretty empty," he said; "but I don't see anything to eat. Isn't it almost supper-time?"
"Yes, my boy," his grandmother answered, with a twinkle in her eye, "it is supper-time; but I thought you wouldn't mind going without one supper, so I didn't get any to-night."
Joe frowned and hung his head. He knew very well what his grandmother meant, and things went a little better for a day or two; but the boy soon fell back into his old tricks.
Every morning Joe emptied the ashes from the kitchen stove for his grandmother. Grandpa Knight had told him over and over again never to empty them until they were cool, and always to put them in an iron barrel that stood in the shed.
One morning Joe went as usual to empty the ashes, which happened to have a good many live coals in them. The iron barrel was full, but Joe was in a hurry to get away for a game of ball. He couldn't bother to empty the barrel, and he surely couldn't wait for the ashes to cool, so he tipped them into a wooden box, live coals and all, and ran off to his game.
Grandma Knight was making another big batch of cookies, and it was not long before she began to smell smoke. She looked all around the stove, but she couldn't find anything that was burning.
"It must be some paper I threw into the fire," she said to herself, and she went on with her baking.
But the smell of smoke grew stronger and stronger, and when she came out of the pantry to slip the first pan of cookies into the oven, she could see a thin blue haze in the kitchen.
"The house is on fire!" she cried, and she ran down cellar and upstairs as fast as she could go, opening all the doors and looking in all the closets to find out what was burning.