“But I’m so big——”
“You mean, you’d be big,” chuckled Neale, “if you were only rolled out,” for he was always teasing Agnes about her plumpness.
“Well! I want to celebrate some way,” sighed Agnes. “Can’t we have a specially nice supper that night?”
“Surely, child,” said her sedate sister. “What do you want?”
“Well!” repeated Agnes, slowly; “you know I’ll never graduate from Grammar again. Couldn’t we kill some of those nice frying chickens of yours, Ruthie?”
“Oh, my!” cried Neale. “What have the poor chickens done that they should be slaughtered to make a Roman holiday?”
“Mr. Smartie!” snapped Agnes. “You be good, or you sha’n’t have any.”
“If that Tom Jonah hadn’t been busy on a certain night, none of us would have eaten those particular frying chickens,” laughed Neale. “I wonder if that Gypsy is running yet?”
“He didn’t get the frying chickens in the bag,” said Agnes. “They were in another coop. We hatched them in January and brought them up by hand. Say! I don’t believe you know much about natural history, Neale, anyway.”
“I guess he knows more than Sammy Pinkney does,” Tess said, again drawn into the conversation. “Teacher asked him to tell us two breeds of dairy cattle and which gives the most milk. She’d been reading to us about it out of a book. So Sammy says: