“Hello, Nan Verling!  Is that you?”

“I suppose so, but I wish it wasn’t,” answered Nannie, dolefully.

“What for?” questioned Tommy, in still further astonishment.

“’Cause I wish I was somebody else that wasn’t all wrinkled and mussed up.  I don’t see how folks can keep nice and have good times, anyway,” declared Nan, in a burst of confidence.  “You see, I just helped sail boats in the brook, and I didn’t know my dress was wet a bit till I came away; and then Lizzie Sykes tagged me, and course I had to tag her back again.  I don’t know what made her run right through the mud, where I couldn’t catch her without getting my shoes all muddy.  Should think she might have known better!  My old ink-stand at school is always upsetting itself, and it had to spill on my clean white apron this afternoon.  Then my sun-bonnet—­”

“Looks as if you’d hung it up in your pocket,” suggested Tommy.

“Well, I didn’t; I only rolled it up for a rag-baby when we played keep house at recess.  I s’pose it’s bad for bonnets, but it made the beautifulest kind of a baby,” said Nannie, a little ray of enthusiasm gleaming through her despondency.  “But Aunt S’mantha doesn’t ’preciate such things,” she added, mournfully.

“No,” answered Tommy, sympathetically.  “She’ll scold, may be?”

“P’r’aps so.  May be she’ll send me to bed without any supper.”

“Whew!  That a’nt any fun, I tell you!” declared Tommy.  “Why, a fellow just tumbles and tumbles, and gets hungrier and hungrier, and wonders what the folks have got for supper, and looks at the stars, and tries to say ‘Hickory-dickory-dock’ backward, and wishes it was morning.  It just feels awful!”

“I didn’t ever try it, and I don’t s’pose I could stand it,” said Nannie, shaking dejectedly the curly head in the flopping sun-bonnet.  “I’ve a good mind not to go home at all, but just run away off somewhere, and be a foundling.  Foundlings have pretty good times, ’cause I’ve read about ’em in books.  They get adopted by some great lady in a big house, and grow up rich, and get to be real handsome.”

“I don’t believe you would,” declared Tommy, more honestly than politely.

Nan meditated a minute, and then said, with a sigh: 

“Well, I guess I’ll have to go home, then.”

“Scoldings don’t last very long, anyway,” urged Tommy, consolingly.

“But if you sort o’ think you oughtn’t to have done things, and did ought to be more careful—­and everything—­it makes it seem more worse, you know,” remarked Nannie, in a hesitating, half-penitent way. “’Cause I do like Aunt S’mantha.”

“Yes,” admitted Tommy, knitting his brow over the complications of the case, and searching his own experience for a suggestion of relief.  “If you only had something nice to carry home to her—­something she wants.  Once I got wet as a rat playing round the pond, but I’d caught two fish—­reg’lar tip-top trout—­and I took ’em home to mother; held ’em up where they’d be seen first thing, you know.  And she said, ’What nice fish!’ and didn’t scold a wink.”