Budge reflected for a moment. “Well,” said he, “didn’t you cry when your tea-party was spoiled last week on your burfday? To be sure, your tea-party was bigger than ours, but then you’re a good deal bigger than we, too, an’ I haven’t cried a bit.”
Mrs. Burton saw the point and was mentally unable to avoid it. The view was not a pleasant one, and grew more humiliating the longer it was presented. It was, perhaps, to banish it that she rose from her chair, brought from a closet in the dining-room some of the coveted cake and gave a piece to each boy, saying:
“It isn’t that Aunt Alice cares so much for her cake, dears, that she doesn’t like you to have it between meals, but because it is bad for little boys to eat such heavy food excepting at their regular meals. There are grown people who were once happy little children, but now they are very cross all the while because their stomachs are disordered by having eaten when they should not, and eating things which are richer and heavier than their bodies can use.”
“Well,” said Budge, crowding the contents of his mouth into his cheeks, “we can eat somethin’ plainer an’ lighter to mix up with ’em inside of us. I should think charlotte-russe or whipped cream would be about the thing. Shall I ask the cook to fix some?”
“No! Exercise would be better than anything else. I think you had better take a walk.”
“Up to Hawkshnesht Rock?” Toddie suggested.
“Oh, yes!” exclaimed Budge. “An’ you come with us, Aunt Alice; perhaps you’ll look that way again; that way, you know, an’ I wouldn’t like to lose any of it.”
PRETENDING TO BE HORSES
Mrs. Burton could not decline so delicate an invitation, and soon the trio were on the road, Mrs. Burton walking leisurely on the turf by the side, while the boys ploughed their way through the dust of the middle of the road, pretending to be horses and succeeding so far as to create a dust-cloud which no team of horses could have excelled.