She took the children out on the porch and presently they came in, each on hands and feet, and meowed with persistence if not with fervor.
“That’s meant to be a word, Granny and Scip, can you guess what it is?”
“Cats,” said Granny.
“That’s right,” Hazel cried, clapping her hands. “Cat. You guessed right the first time, didn’t you? Now we act the next word.”
She skipped out of the room with the children onto the porch. She was beginning to feel like herself. Granny smoothed her dress complacently.
Presently two boys came in and stood across the room each holding the end of a long string. A third child, a girl with an apron on, walked solemnly forward and fastened a towel to the string with a clothes-pin. Immediately Hazel, with a dark shawl stretched out at arms-length to look like wings, hopped up and nipped off the nose of the maid, who gave a very creditable sob.
“Along came a black-bird and nipped off her nose,” the two boys said.
“That’s a little word,” explained Hazel, “and if you put it with cat it makes a longer word.”
Granny and Scip listened in silence; a charade seemed outside their mental horizon.
But Hazel and her troupe acted the whole word with studied care, and five little cats rolled about ecstatically in the green stuff Hazel threw to them.