As the little man stayed choked until after 'Lisbeth's mother had tripped to the door, and tossed away her bundle, and held up her hands, and implored to be told what was the matter, I shall never be able to say certainly that he was an honest little man, but I shall always believe that he was, and that it had been the thought of so much wickedness that almost choked him before he had the crack on the back or the mouthful from the dipper. You would have choked, or almost choked, of course you would. The astonishing part was that 'Lisbeth did not choke herself, but she never thought of such a thing, she only said, when her mother asked her what was the matter, "Nothing's the matter at all; but I'm most dreadful sorry you come just at this important minute; I was going to s'prise you with some cash straight off short, and the man must just fall to choking before I could get a living thing sold."
Another surprising thing is that the mother did not choke, but she did not. Perhaps the reason was because she did not want to; the little man looked uncomfortable and he had been choking. At any rate she did not choke.
If the little man had not looked so uncomfortable, and ready to get away, the mother might have fastened the door, and shouted fire, and armed with the tongs, and screamed for help, and startled the house, and frightened the street, and added confusion to confusion, but she only pulled the door open on a bigger crack to let him run out and down the stairs, holding his hands over his head and gasping, "My! my! my! my head!"
CHAPTER XIV.
All that the mother did after the little man was gone I shall not pretend to say. I was not there at the time. Had I been there I would have been obliged to stand with my feet outside and my head within; how could I have had both head and feet within when there was no room to stand? But I was not there, and never have been sorry that I was not. You are not sorry that you were not there? Of course you are not.
'Lisbeth would have been glad not to have been there, I suppose; the mother herself would have been more comfortable somewhere else, even if it had been in the street tugging home her bundle of clothes to be sewed. I was not there at the time, but I am certain that, by the next morning, the dishes stood in rows, the pans hung on the hooks; the jars and jams, and pots and kettles, and skillets, and spiders, and spoons, and dippers, and rollers, and beaters, and boilers, and broilers, and bundles, and boxes, and baskets, and things of all names and all sizes were sleeping as sweetly as such necessities ever sleep, in the cupboards and closets and dangling from the hooks, and the mother was putting in her needle and pulling it out, and nobody would have imagined that things had ever been otherwise.
Yet things had been otherwise; we all know they had. Things might have been otherwise still had not 'Lisbeth's mother been a very decided mother; a mother who knew how things should be and how they should not be, and how little children should do and how they should not do, and how to get disordered things back into order as they should be, and children who were doing as they should not, for a little while at least, to do as they should.
She said to 'Lisbeth, as she stood with her two feet on the two places where the little man had stood: "'Lisbeth, you are a very hindering child!"
Had she said anything else, anything else at all, 'Lisbeth would not have felt it so much, she would not have been so entirely lifted out of herself, out of her own opinion, and made to see herself where her mother put her, back in the right place where every naughty child should be put as soon as possible.