"We have a chair all ready for you; it is standing right under one of the plant-shelves, and there are three roses in bloom to-day!"
Still not a word.
"And I had to tell the dog story without you!"
The effect of this simple statement was very different from what I had anticipated. I thought I knew what a child was likely to do under every conceivable set of circumstances, but Patsy was destined to be more than once a revelation to me.
He dashed a book of colored advertisements that he held into the farthest corner of the room, threw himself on the floor at full length and beat it with his hands, while he burst into a passion of tears. "There! there!" he cried between his sobs, "I told 'em you'd tell it! I told 'em you'd tell it! I told 'em you'd—but oh, I thought maybe you wouldn't!" His wails brought Mrs. Kennett from a back piazza where she was washing.
"Are you the teacher o' the Kids Guards, 'm?"
"Yes." It did not strike me at the time, in my anxiety, what a sympathetic rendering of the German word this was; but we afterwards found that "Kindergarten" was thus translated in Anna Street.
"Patsy couldn't go to-day, 'm, on account of him hevin' no good boots, 'm, Jim not bein' paid off till Wednesday, 'n me hevin' no notice he hed no clean shirt, 'm, this not bein' his clean-shirt week, 'm. He takes it awful hard about that there story, 'm. I told him as how you'd be after tellin' another one next week, but it seems nothin' will comfort him."
"Ev'rybuddy's allers lyin' to me," he moaned; "there warn't another dog picture like that in the hull room!"
"Don't take no notice of him, 'm, an' he'll git over it; he's subjick to these spells of takin' on like. Set up, Pat, an' act decent! Tell the lady you'll come when you git your boots."