“Oh, he ain’t no trouble now except he wants to find out all about the world by tasting of it.  Don’t let him eat a worm or sech, and he’ll be all right,” answered the beaming young mother of the toddler.  “And, Miss Nancy, I was jest going to tell you that I have got a nice pattern of a plain kind of work dress if you would like to use it,” she added as she pointedly did not look at my peasant’s smock that hung in such lovely long lines that I found myself pausing much too often before one of the mirrors in the big living-room to admire them.  Mrs. Tillett’s utility costume was of blue checked gingham and had no lines at all except top and bottom, with a belt in between.  Both ladies wore huge gingham aprons, and I must say that they looked like the utility branch of the feminine species while I may have resembled the ornamental.  But they were dear neighbors, and the Tillett baby and I had a very busy and happy day with the Golden Bird and his busy family while the two missionaries did over every bed in Elmnest, even invading the living-room and shaking out the cushions of the old couch in the very face of one of the charges of Xerxes’ army.  I put his babykins in a big feed-basket in a nest of hay, and the two lamb twins came and licked him every now and then by way of welcome into my barn nursery.  The fine young sheep mother was now in blooming health, and the valuable progeny were growing by the hours, most of which they spent at the maternal fount, opposite each other and both small tails going like a new variety of speedometer.

“I see mother ewe knows enough to hang around the lady of the barn and feed-bins.  Those lambkins are two pounds heavier than any born within a week of them at Plunkett’s,” Pan had said not a week past, and both sheep mother and I had beamed with gratified pride at his commendation.

[Illustration:  I put his babykins in a big feed-basket and the lamb twins came and welcomed him]

Then while the renovation of the four-posters went on with a happy buzz, I busied myself in and out and about with the numberless details of care of the Bird family.  My knowledge of music earned by many long hours in the practice of harmonics and a delighted and diligent attendance at the opera seasons of New York, Berlin, and Paris, to say nothing of Boston and London, had not, in my new life, in any way aided me to see that I had made a mistake in ordering a three-hundred-egg incubator to start building a prize flock with Mr. Golden Bird and the ten Ladies Leghorn, but in this case Adam had guided me from off that shoal, and by telegram I had changed the order for three fifty-egg improved metal mothers and the implements needed in accomplishing their maternal purpose.  In one of them were now fifty beautiful white pearls that I could not refrain from visiting and regarding through the little window in the metallic side of the metallic mother at least several times an hour, though I knew that twice a day to regulate the heat and fill the lamp was sufficient.