“We’ll go up to my room and mend the drum,” declared Mrs. Horton. “Tell Mr. Bray I’ll telephone him about the slip-covers, please, Harriet. I left him in the parlor when I ran out to see what was happening to Sunny Boy.”
“What,” demanded Sunny Boy, carrying his drum upstairs—and you may be sure that he gripped it tightly this time—“What are slip-covers, Mother?”
Mrs. Horton laughed.
“Why, slip-covers are—” She thought a minute. “They are covers for the chairs and sofas to wear in summer,” she explained. “Nice, cool, linen covers, you know, for the furniture, just as you have summer suits.”
Sunny Boy understood. He usually did when Mother answered his questions. And he was very sure that she could mend his drum.
“Do you know,” said Mrs. Horton, when she had looked at the hole, “I think, Sunny Boy, we can mend this nicely with court-plaster?”
“Court-plaster?” echoed Sunny Boy.
“I have some in the medicine closet in the bathroom,” went on Mrs. Horton, drawing the edges of the hole together as she talked. “I’ll get it, dear.”
“It’s like mending fingers, isn’t it, Mother?” Sunny Boy was so anxious to watch how Mother mended the drum that he nearly put his own pink nose in the hole. “When Daddy cut his finger he put court-plaster on it. He said the skin would grow together, and it did—when he took it off, there wasn’t any cut there. Just nothing. Will my drum be like that?”
“No, precious,” answered Mother, snipping around the edges of the court-plaster with the fascinating sharp shears Sunny Boy was forbidden to touch. “A drum, you know, isn’t like a person’s skin. It can’t grow. But I think that if you remember to be careful the drum will last a long time. There you are. My goodness! it makes as much noise as ever, doesn’t it?” and Mrs. Horton covered her ears and laughed as Sunny Boy beat merrily on his mended drum.