Mr. Burton saw something in his wife's face that seemed to call for lover-like treatment; but it was not without a sense of injury that he exclaimed, immediately after, as he drew forth his watch:
"I declare! I would make an affidavit that we hadn't been awake half an hour. Ah! I forgot to wind up my watch last night."
The boys hurried into the parlor.
"I hear 'em trampin' around!" exclaimed Budge, in great excitement. "There!—the piano's shut! Isn't that too mean! Oh, I'll tell you—here's Uncle Harry's violin."
"Then whatsh I goin' to play on?" asked Toddie, dancing frantically about.
"Wait a minute," said Budge, dropping the violin, and hurrying to the floor above, from which he speedily returned with a comb. A bound volume of the Portfolio lay upon the table, and opening this, Badge tore the tissue paper from one of the etchings and wrapped the comb in it.
"There!" said he, "you fiddle an' I'll blow the comb. Goodness! why don't they come down? Oh, we forgot to put pennies under the plate, and we don't know how many years old to put 'em for."
"An' we ain't got no pennies," said Toddie.
"I know," said Budge, hurrying to a cabinet in a drawer of which his uncle kept the nucleus of a collection of American coinage. "This kind of pennies," Budge continued, "isn't so pretty as our kind, but they're bigger, an' they'll look better on a table-cloth. Now, how old do you think she is?"
"I dunno," said Toddie, going into a reverie of hopeless conjecture. "She's about as big as you and me put togevver."