“Not that it’s much of a weapon,” he said.  “Far less like a sickle than a dissipated saw, to quote.  But the edge is rusted so thin that I believe it’ll do the trick.”

Kirk gathered the grass up into soft scratchy heaps as Ken mowed it, keeping at a respectful distance behind the swinging sickle.  Ken began to whistle, then stopped to hear the marsh frogs, which were still chorusing their mad joy in the flight of winter.

“I made up a pome about those thar toads,” Ken said, “last night after you’d gone to sleep again.”

Kirk leaped dangerously near the sickle.

“You haven’t made me a pome for ages!” he cried.  “Stop sickling and do it—­quick!”

“It’s a grand one,” Ken said; “listen to this!

“Down in the marshes the sounds begin
Of a far-away fairy violin,
Faint and reedy and cobweb thin.

“Cricket and marsh-frog and brown tree-toad,
Sit in the sedgy grass by the road,
Each at the door of his own abode;

“Each with a fairy fiddle or flute
Fashioned out of a briar root;
The fairies join their notes, to boot.

“Sitting all in a magic ring,
They lift their voices and sing and sing,
Because it is April, ‘Spring!  Spring!’”

“That is a nice one!” Kirk agreed.  “It sounds real.  I don’t know how you can do it.”

A faint clapping was heard from the direction of the house, and turning, Ken saw his sister dropping him a curtsey at the door.  “That,” she said, “is a poem, not a pome—­a perfectly good one.”

“Go ’way!” shouted Ken.  “You’re a wicked interloper.  And you don’t even know why Kirk and I write pomes about toads, so you don’t!”

“I never could see,” Ken remarked that night, “why people are so keen about beds of roses.  If you ask me, I should think they’d be uncommon prickly and uncomfortable.  Give me a bed of herbs—­where love is, don’t you know?”

“It wasn’t a bed of herbs,” Felicia contended; “it was a dinner of them.  This isn’t herbs, anyway.  And think of the delectable smell of the bed of roses!”

“But every rose would have its thorn,” Ken objected.  “No, no, ‘herbs’ is preferable.”

This argument was being held during the try-out of the grass beds in the living-room.

“See-saw, Margery Daw,
She packed up her bed and lay upon straw,”

sang Felicia.

But the grass was an improvement.  Grass below and Mrs. Hop’s quilts above, with the overcoats in reserve—­the Sturgises considered themselves quite luxurious, after last night’s shift at sleep.

“What care we if the beds don’t come?” Ken said.  “We could live this way all summer.  Let them perish untended in the trolley freight-house.”

But when Kirk was asleep, the note of the conversation dropped.  Ken and Felicia talked till late into the night, in earnest undertones, of ways and means and the needs of the old house.