"Oh!" exclaimed Belle, indignant.
"Why, Lily!" said Bessie, "that's Time with his hour-glass and scythe, and Belle drew that picture, and we think it's the very best one of all."
"I'm sorry," said Lily, rather ashamed of not having at once recognized the articles in question.
"You know in the pictures Time is always a very thin old man," said Bessie, "so we had to make him so to have it real; and Maggie told Belle she'd better make him as thin as she could, 'cause that horrid thief Procrastination bothers him so he hardly has any flesh on his bones. This is a kind of allegory picture, you see, Lily."
"Yes, I understand. And this rather beggar-looking child—" Lily hesitated again, unwilling to run the risk of making any more such uncomplimentary mistakes. "I think you'd better tell me about it. I'm 'fraid I'm rather stupid this morning. I think I went crazy last night about that inkstand, and I'm hardly recovered yet. I b'lieve that's the reason I didn't know Time's hour-glass and scythe at first."
Never before had her little friends known Lily to speak and look with such solemnity, and they all felt very much for her.
Maggie, however, thought it well to improve the occasion.
"I did not want to seem severe with her," she said afterward to Bessie and Belle, "but I thought the picture might make a deeper impression if I let her see to what a dreadful condition procrastinating people might come."
"Yes," she said to Lily, "yes, that is Procrastination, all ragged and dirty and starved. He never has a nice time, and he hardly ever has any thing to eat, 'cause when people say to him, 'Procrastination, dinner is ready,' he says, 'I think I'll eat by and by;' and then when he comes, the dinner is all gone, and he has to go hungry: and when they say, 'Go and get washed, and have on clean clothes,' he says, 'Another day I will;' so he becomes all ragged, and his friends are so ashamed of him that they just let him take care of himself. That's the way he looks so horridly. And poor old Time hardly knows what to do with himself for the way that troublesome fellow worries him. He doesn't leave Time alone to do his duty one minute. Do you see these things in Procrastination's hand?"