Budge & Toddie; Or, Helen's Babies at Play. Habberton John

be dry by this time.”

      Mr. Burton consulted his watch, and replied:

      “I’ve barely time to catch the fast train to town, my dear, but the boys won’t fail to get back by dinner-time. Then you may be able to ascertain the jar’s whereabouts.”

      Mr. Burton hurried from the front door, and his wife made no less haste in the opposite direction. The boys were invisible, and a careful glance at the adjacent country showed no traces of them. Mrs. Burton called the cook and chambermaid, and the three women took, each one, a roadway through the lightly wooded ground near the house. Mrs. Burton soon recognized familiar voices, and following them to their source, she emerged from the wood near the rear of the boys’s own home. Going closer, she traced the voices to the Lawrence barn, and she appeared before the door of that structure to see her beloved jar in the middle of the floor, and full of green tomatoes, over which the boys were pouring the contents of bottles labeled “Mustang Liniment” and “Superior Carriage Varnish.” The boys became conscious of the presence of their aunt, and Toddie, with a smile in which confidence blended with the assurance of success attained, said:

      “We’s makin’ pickles for you, ’cause you told us a nysh little story. This is just the way mamma makes ’em, only we couldn’t make the stuff in the bottles hot.”

      Mrs. Burton’s readiness of expression seemed to fail her, and as she abruptly quitted the spot, with a hand of each nephew in her own, Budge indicated the nature of her feelings by exclaiming:

      “Ow! Aunt Alice! don’t squeeze my hand so hard!”

      “Boys,” said Mrs. Burton, “why did you take my jar without permission?”

      “What did you say?” asked Budge. “Do you mean what did we take it for?”

      “Certainly.”

      “Why, we wanted to give you a s’prise.”

      “You certainly succeeded,” said Mrs. Burton, without a moment’s hesitation.

      “You must give us s’prises, too,” said Toddie. “S’prises is lovaly; papa gives us lots of ’em. Sometimes they’s candy, but they’s nicest when they’s buttonanoes” (bananas).

      “How would you like to be shut up in a dark room all morning, to think about the naughty thing you’ve done?” asked Mrs. Burton.

      “Huh!” replied Budge. “That wouldn’t be no s’prise at all. We can do that any time that we do anything bad, and papa and mamma finds out. Why, you forgot to bring your pickles home! I don’t think you act very nice about presents and s’prises.”

      “WE’S MAKIN’s PICKLES FOR YOU”

      Mrs. Burton did not explain nor did she spend much time in conversation. When she reached her own door, however, she turned and said:

      “Now, boys, you may play anywhere in the yard that you like, but you must not go away or come into the house until I call you, at twelve o’clock. I shall be very busy this morning, and must not be disturbed. You will try to be good boys, won’t you?”

      “I will,” exclaimed Toddie, turning up an honest little face for a kiss, and dragging his aunt down until he could put his arms about her and give her an affectionate hug. Budge seemed lost in meditation, but the sound of the closing of the door brought him back to earth; he threw the door open, and exclaimed:

      “Aunt Alice!”

      “What?”

      “Come here—I want to ask you something.”

      “It’s your business to come to me, Budge, if you have a favor to ask,” said Mrs. Burton, from the parlor.

      “Oh! Well, what I want to know is, how did the Lord make the first hornet—the very first one that ever was?”

      “Just the way he made everything else,” replied Mrs. Burton. “Just by wanting it done.”

      “Then did Noah save hornets in the ark?” continued Budge. “ ’Cause I don’t see how he kept ’em from stingin’ his boys and girls, and then gettin’ killed ’emselves.”

      “You ask me about it after lunch, Budge,” said Mrs. Burton, “and I will tell you all I can. Now run and play.”

      The door closed again, and Mrs. Burton, somewhat confused, but still resolute, seated herself at the piano for practice. She had been playing perhaps ten minutes, when a long-drawn sigh from some one not herself caused her to turn hastily and behold the boy Budge. A stern reproof was ready, but somehow it never reached the young man. Mrs. Burton afterward explained her silence by saying that Budge’s countenance was so utterly doleful that she was sure his active conscience had realized the impropriety of his affair with the jar, and he had come to confess.

      “Aunt Alice,” said Budge, “do you know I don’t think much of your garden? There ain’t a turtle to be found in it from one end to the other, and no nice grassy place to slide down like there is at our house.”

      “Can’t you understand, little boy,” replied Mrs. Burton, “that we arranged the house and grounds to suit ourselves, and not little boys who come to see us?”

      “Well, I don’t think that was a very nice thing to do,” said Budge. “My papa says we ought to care as much about pleasing other folks as we do for ourselves. I didn’t want to make you that jar of pickles, but Tod said ’twould be nice for you, so I went and did it, instead of askin’ a man that drove past to give me a ride. That’s the way you ought to do about gardens.”

      “Suppose you run out now,” said Mrs. Burton, “I told you not to come in until I called you.”

      “But you see I came in for my top—I laid it down in the dining-room when I came in, and now it ain’t there at all. I’d like to know what you’ve done with it, and why folks can’t let little boys’s things alone.”

      “Budge,” exclaimed Mrs. Burton, turning suddenly on the piano-stool, “I think there’ a very cross little boy around here somewhere. Suppose I were to lose something?”

      “ ’Twas a three-cent top,” said Budge. “ ’Twasn’t only a something.”

      “Suppose, then, that I were to lose a top,” said Mrs. Burton, “what do you suppose I would do if I wanted it very much?”

      “You’d call the servant to find it—that’ what I want you to do now,” said Budge.

      “I shouldn’t do anything of the kind. Try to think, now, of what a sensible person ought to do in such a case.”

      Budge dejectedly traced with his toe one of the figures in the carpet, and seemed buried in thought; suddenly, however, his face brightened, and he looked up shyly and said, with an infinite scale of inflection:—

      “I know.”

      “I thought you would find out,” said Mrs. Burton, with an encouraging kiss and embrace, which Budge terminated quite abruptly.

      “One victory to report to my superior officer, the dear old humbug,” murmured Mrs. Burton, as she turned again to the keyboard. But before the lady could again put herself en rapport with the composer Budge came flying into the room with a radiant face, and the missing top.

      “I told you I knew what you’d do,” said he, “an’ I just went and done it. I prayed about it. I went up-stairs into a chamber and shut the door, and knelt down an’ said, ‘Dear Lord, bless everybody, an’ don’t let me be bad, an’ help me to find that top again, an’ don’t let me have to pray for it as long as I had to pray for that baby.’s And then when I came down-stairs there was that top on the register, just where I left it. Say, Aunt Alice, I think brekbux was an awful long while ago. Don’t you have cakes and oranges to give to little boys?”

      “Children