“Smelly-Welly Bowser,” repeated Mrs. Bowser over and over, as if under some horrible spell. “Smelly-Welly Bowser. My baby! Smelly-Welly Bowser.”
“They got the memos mixed, Pandora,” he said abjectly. “I tell you they got the memos mixed.”
“Smelly-Welly Bowser,” she moaned. “You wanted an unusual name! You wanted a name no one will forget! You wanted a name easy to say! Well, you’ve got it! Oh, dear; oh, dear—Smelly-Welly Bowser! My son. Smelly-Welly——”
“Oh, Pandora,” he cried, taking her hand, “how can you—or he—ever forgive me?”
She looked up and the beginning of a smile twitched her lips.
“Now we’ll just have to call him John,” she said.
THE WRONGING OF EDWIN DELL
“ONE, two, three, four,” counted Aunt Charity as she put the hard-boiled eggs into the shoebox beside the bananas, and twisted a little cornucopia from the sheep-dip advertisement in the Crosby Corners’ News to hold the pepper and salt. “Do you think four will be enough, Edwin?”
“Four what, Aunt Charity?” asked Edwin Dell, looking up from his book; it was Jeremy Taylor’s “Holy Living and Holy Dying.”
“These,” she said, pointing a long, pale forefinger. She never mentioned the word egg. To her there was a suggestion of the improper about an egg.