lay Yassuh, fast asleep and half melted; while little wisps of smoke curled out of the crack between the oven and the door.  The stove was almost as big as the tin one Jimmy had given Sara for Christmas, but much more massive and efficient-looking.  On the table, looking so delicious that they made your mouth water, were the ingredients with which Yassuh had been working:  a bubble-pitcher of milk-weed cream, a bowl of butterfly eggs (the daintiest things!), a silver panful of flour from the best white miller, and a large silk sack of snow-sugar from the Garden.  Sara had to put her hands behind her back.

“Yassuh!” shouted Pirlaps; and Sara had never before heard him speak angrily.  “The messy little rascal!  I can’t even kick him to wake him up—­I’d never get my foot out!  Where are the tongs?  Here, Sara, you take the poker, and help me with him!”

So saying, Pirlaps picked the soft and sleeping Yassuh up gingerly with the tongs, and Sara put the poker crosswise under the softest part of him to keep him from pulling apart, and together they carried him to the door and dropped him outside, where he made a delicious-looking brown puddle on the silver snow.

“You stay and watch him till he hardens,” called Pirlaps, hurrying back toward the kitchen, “and don’t let him go to sleep again.  As soon as he’s hard enough, send him straight in here to me.”

Sara stood on the doorstep watching Yassuh, who was now awake and grinning, and she was very much interested to see how, as he hardened, he wriggled himself back into shape, like a chrysalis that has just shed its caterpillar skin.  She was sure this was no new experience to Yassuh.

Presently she thought he was hard enough to be taken back into the kitchen; and there they found Pirlaps, sitting with flushed face upon his own fast-melting step, taking little muffin-pans full of fresh-baked crumbs out of the oven.  One panful, alas, was burnt to a crisp, and some of the others were a shade too brown; but oh, they did smell and look so very delightful!  Considered as muffins (and they looked so like them that Sara could not help being reminded of them) they were certainly the tiniest things imaginable; considered as crumbs (and that was what she had heard Pirlaps call them) they were considerably above the average in size.  For all that, what discouragingly small crumbs for such appallingly large birds!  No wonder Pirlaps was so worried, and looked so unnaturally hurried and strenuous!

“Here, Yassuh!” he called, without stopping to scold him.  “You empty these into the baskets and take them right out to the table; and then you hurry right back and get another batch into the oven as quick as you can.  Roll!”

Yassuh, apparently quite refreshed by his nap, went tumbling out with the fragrant baskets, and Sara hurried after Pirlaps in his anxious search for Avrillia.  At last they thought of the balcony; and as they ran up the stairs, there, indeed, they saw Avrillia, with her white arm outstretched above the balustrade, watching a curled rose-leaf as it floated down, down, down.