Topeka, sitting on the side of the bed, with tousled hair, put her small feet together and contemplated them.  The toe was still suspiciously inflamed for perfect convalescence, although Topeka, with a Spartan courage that won her a place in the annals of household valor, had the day before allowed her mother to pick out with a needle the torturing cactus thorn, scorning to shed a tear during the operation, though afterwards she had taken the piece of dried apple that was offered her and devoured it to the last bite, as only just compensation for her sufferings.

“Dimmy dot a tore toe, too.”  But Jimmy showed a strange reticence about offering proofs of his affliction.  At the peril of his equilibrium, he clasped the allegedly injured member in his chubby hand and rolled over on the bed in apparent anguish.

“Less see, Jimmy,” asked his mother, anxiously.

“Don’t bleeve him, mammy.  He ’ain’t ever cried.  He’d a cried, for sure, if his toe was sore.”  At the age of five, little Judith, namesake of her aunt, was something of a doubting Thomas.

“Let mammy see, Jimmy,” and Alida bent over her son and heir.

“Doth Dimmy det any apple?” The wee man sometimes succeeded in making terms with his mother, when the other children were not present.  Though feeling himself a trifle over-confident, he held the disputed toe with the air of one keeping back a trump card, and looked his mother squarely in the eyes.

She struggled with the temptation to give him the apple.  He had lifted the horrors of her dream as nothing else could have done, but she answered him with quiet firmness.

“Jimmy must not tell stories.”

“Less see,” insisted Topeka.

“He dassent,” affirmed Judith, junior, of little faith.

“It hurths me,” and Jimmy tried to squeeze out a tear.  “It hurths me, my tore toe!”

His mother tipped him over on his fat little back and opened the chubby hand that held the trump toe.  It was white from the pressure applied by the infant dissembler, but there was no trace of the treacherous cactus thorn.  She gave him an affectionate spank and went into the kitchen to make coffee.

“I with I had a tore toe,” he crooned, quite unabashed at the discovery of his deception.  “I with I toud det a tore toe ’thout the hurt.”

But the horror of the dream gripped her when she found herself alone in the kitchen; and she remembered she had not told the children not to go into the room where their father was sleeping.  She went back and found that Jimmy had not left his post on the side of the bed, where he still regretted that his perfectly well toe did not entitle him to gastronomic consideration.  Topeka, who had arrived at an age where little girls, in the first subconscious attempt at adornment, know no keener delight than plastering their heads with a wet hairbrush, till they present an appearance of slippery rotundity equalled only by a peeled onion, put down the brush with guilty haste at sight of her mother.