"Do you mean it, ma'am?" asked the boy eagerly.
"Yes."
"Thank you, kindly. I'd like to go, but I wasn't goin' to ask. My mother says askin's a bad habit. Them that has it is apt to ask more than they'd ought to many times."
Meanwhile, up on the roof of the new kitchen in the hot afternoon sun sat Mike with his knife. He had marked out the size of the pipe-hole with a pencil, and with set lips was putting all the force of his strong, young arms into the work. A big straw hat was on his head—a common straw, worth about fifteen cents. Clustered below were the little boys.
"No, you can't come up," Mike had just said in answer to their entreaties. "The roof won't bear you."
"'Twould bear me, and I could help you cut the hole," said Jim.
"There goes Jim again," soliloquized the widow. "Wantin' to cut a round hole in a boord with a knife, when 'tis only himself he'd be cuttin', and not the boord at all. It's not so much that he's iver for doin' what he can't, but he's awful set against doin' what he can. Jim, come here!" she called.
Jim obeyed.
"You see how loike your father Pat and Moike and Andy is, some wan way and some another. Do you want to be loike him, too?"
