“Excuse me.  I didn’t expect to make any trouble”—­

“Oh, I’ve nothin’ agin you, but just let me ketch her puttin’ on airs ‘n pertendin’ to live like her betters, that’s all!  She’s done it before, but I couldn’t never ketch her at it.  The idee of her keepin’ up a house like this!” and with a superb sniff like that of a battle-horse, she disappeared from the front window of her ancestral mansion and sought one at the back which might command a view of my meeting with her rival.

I slid meekly through a side gate, every picket of which was decorated with a small child, stumbled up a dark narrow passage, and found myself in a square sort of court out of which rose the rear houses so objectionable to my Duchess in the front row.

It was not plain sailing, by any means, owing to the collection of tin cans and bottles through which I had to pick my way, but I climbed some frail wooden steps, and stood at length on the landing of Number 32-1/2.

The door was open, and there sat Patsy, “minding” the Kennett baby, a dull little lump of humanity, whose brain registered impressions so slowly that it would play all day long with an old shoe without exhausting its possibilities.

Patsy himself was dirtier than ever, and much more sullen and gloomy.  The traces of tears on his cheeks made my heart leap into my throat.  “Oh, Patsy,” I exclaimed, “I am so glad to find you!  We expected you all day, and were afraid you weren’t well.”

Not a word of response.

“We have a chair all ready for you; it is standing right under one of the plant-shelves, and there are three roses in bloom to-day!”

Still not a word.

“And I had to tell the dog story without you!”

The effect of this simple statement was very different from what I had anticipated.  I thought I knew what a child was likely to do under every conceivable set of circumstances, but Patsy was destined to be more than once a revelation to me.

He dashed a book of colored advertisements that he held into the farthest corner of the room, threw himself on the floor at full length and beat it with his hands, while he burst into a passion of tears.  “There! there!” he cried between his sobs, “I told ’em you’d tell it!  I told ’em you’d tell it!  I told ’em you’d—­but oh, I thought maybe you wouldn’t!” His wails brought Mrs. Kennett from a back piazza where she was washing.

“Are you the teacher o’ the Kids Guards, ’m?”

“Yes.”  It did not strike me at the time, in my anxiety, what a sympathetic rendering of the German word this was; but we afterwards found that “Kindergarten” was thus translated in Anna Street.

“Patsy couldn’t go to-day, ‘m, on account of him hevin’ no good boots, ‘m, Jim not bein’ paid off till Wednesday, ‘n me hevin’ no notice he hed no clean shirt, ‘m, this not bein’ his clean-shirt week, ’m.  He takes it awful hard about that there story, ’m.  I told him as how you’d be after tellin’ another one next week, but it seems nothin’ will comfort him.”