“It almost seems I heard a giant fall down the chimney,” the Irish girl whispered hoarsely.

“I dare say you did hear the bricks falling.  There’s a gallon or two of soot in the dining-room fireplace for you to clean up in the morning.”

“’Tis easy, that, compared wid cleaning up the whole house that seemed like to tumble!” said Moya with a sigh of relief.

The children were already asleep and the remainder of the night was unbroken by any sound save the dripping of the raindrops from the branches and the swish of wet leaves against each other when a light breeze revived their former activities.

Little Vladimir was up early with a memory of something queer having happened in the night.  He was eager to go downstairs and find out what it was all about and his mother dressed him and let him out of her room and then turned over to take another nap.  When Moya went down to set the oil stove in position for use he was amusing himself contentedly with the rubbish in the fireplace, his face and hands already in need of renewed attention from his mother.

“’Tis the sooty-faced young one ye are,” she called to him good-naturedly.  “Run up to the brook and wash yerself an’ save yer mother the throuble.”

She opened the back door and he ran out into the yard, but instead of going up the lane to the brook he scampered round the house and down the lane.  Moya called after him but he paid no attention.  “Sure, I’ve too much to do to be day-nursing that young Russian,” she murmured.

There were wonderings and ejaculations in many tongues when all the women and children came down and examined the cracks in the kitchen side of the chimney and in the back of the dining-room fireplace and saw the heap of rubbish and bricks piled up in the fireplace.  It gave them something to talk about all the morning.  This was lucky, for the grass was too wet for the children to play on it, and when mothers and children were crowded on the veranda idle words sometimes changed to cross ones.

“Tis strange; they’s good women, iv’ry wan, take ’em alone,” Moya had said one day to Mrs. Schuler and Ethel Blue when they heard from the kitchen the sounds of dispute upon the porch; “yit listen to ’em whin they gits together.”

“That’s because each one of them gets out of the talk just what she puts into it,” explained the Matron.

“Manin’ that if she comes to it cross it’s cross answers she gits.  It’s right ye are, ma’am.  ‘Tis so about likin’ or hatin’ yer work.  Days when yer bring happiness to yer work it goes like a bird, an’ days when ye have the black dog on yer back the work turns round an’ fights wid yer.”