“What’s that over in the corner there?” cried the wife, bending down.  “I can’t see, it’s so dark under there—­something gray; can’t you see, in under there?  You’ll have to crawl way in to get at it—­go way in!” Vandover obeyed.  The sink pipes were so close above him that he was obliged to crouch lower and lower; at length he lay flat upon his stomach.  Prone in the filth under the sink, in the sour water, the grease, the refuse, he groped about with his hand searching for the something gray that the burnisher’s wife had seen.  He found it and drew it out.  It was an old hambone covered with a greenish fuzz.

“Oh, did you ever!” cried the burnisher, holding up his hands.  “Here, don’t drop that on my clean floor; put it in your pail.  Now get out the rest of the dirt, and hurry up, it’s late.”  Vandover crawled back, half the way under the sink again, this time bringing out a rusty pan half full of some kind of congealed gravy that exhaled a choking, acrid odour; next it was an old stocking, and then an ink bottle, a broken rat-trap, a battered teapot lacking a nozzle, a piece of rubber hose, an old comb choked with a great handful of hair, a torn overshoe, newspapers, and a great quantity of other debris that had accumulated there during the occupancy of the previous tenant.

“Now go over the floor with a rag,” ordered the little burnisher, when the last of these articles had been brought out.  “Wipe up all that nasty muck!  Look there by your knee to your left!  Scrub that big spot there with your brush—­looks like grease.  That’s the style—­scrub it hard!” His wife joined her directions to his.  Then it was over here, and over there, now in that corner, now in this, and now with his brush and soap, and now with his dry rag, and hurry up all the time because it was growing late.  But the little boy, carried away by the interest of the occasion, suddenly broke silence for the first time, crying out shrilly, his mouth full of bread and butter, “Hey there!  Get up, you old lazee-bones!”

The others shouted with laughter. There was a smart little boy for you.  Ah, he’d be a man before his mother.  It was wonderful how that boy saw everything that went on.  He took an interest, that was it.  You ought to see, he watched everything, and sometimes he’d plump out with things that were astonishing for a boy of his years.  Only four and a half, too, and they reminded each other of the first day he put on knickerbockers; stood in front of the house on the sidewalk all day long with his hands in his pockets.  The interest was directed from Vandover, they turned their backs, grouping themselves about the little boy.  The burnisher’s sister-in-law felt called upon to tell about her little girl, a matter of family pride. She was going on twelve, and would you suppose that little thing was in next to the last grade in the grammar school?  Her teacher had said that she was a real wonder; never had had such a bright