"Pardon, madame; not ended, but rather begun," was the courtly response.
"Oh, what a lovely party!" was the exclamation from many of the attentive listeners. "And why couldn't we repeat it now?" was the immediate question.
"Indeed I shall," said one of the girls, with a decided shake of her long curls. "My very next party will be an old Virginia evening—dresses, dances, games, and all."
[JOHNNY'S ICE-BOAT.]
When Johnny was quite tired of making himself big pigs out of snowballs, and hammock-chairs for drawing the girls over the snow out of crotched sticks and old shawls, and Scandinavian skates out of barrel staves, he decided he would make an ice-boat, and all the more firmly because the whole family, except his pretty aunt Mamy, told him it was nonsense, and he never could, and an ice-boat was a dangerous thing if he could, and it was of no use anyway.
There were a lot of old skates in the garret, some big nails and some pieces of wood in the shed; his aunt Mamy could help him rig some sort of a sail. It was a pity if he couldn't make an ice-boat, and the river stretching away a glare of ice for twenty miles and more.
He ran down to the shed and chose for himself a board some five feet long, and a cross-board that he nailed on it a foot from the end. About a foot from the other end of the first board he nailed a bit of wood for a seat, the sides of it slanting out so that it was a little wider before than behind. That done, he nailed a couple of braces, slanting from just behind the seat nearly out to the ends of the cross-piece, and from the latter places two others, shorter ones, meeting on the extreme end of the long first board, beyond the cross-piece, so that the whole looked like the frame of a huge kite. He could have done without the braces, which were only stout three-inch-square sticks, but it seemed a little stronger and safer to have them, he said.
It seemed as if every one in the house had an errand for him to do that afternoon, and he almost gave up the idea of finishing his ice-boat at all. "When a fellow has such a piece of work as this in hand people might let him alone," he grumbled. And I don't know how he would have come out if he hadn't divined that his aunt Mamy was making mince patties for some use connected with himself.