“I’m not turning up my nose at you, Olive.  I only felt like sneezing, and wanted to stop it before it had fully commenced, and how could I try to stop it except by working my nose in that way, when I have a big wet potato in one hand and this ugly old knife in the other, and all wet, too.”

“Oh, nonsense, girl, don’t keep on talking about ugly old knives and wet potatoes, but listen to me.  I feel it in my bones that trouble is in store for us, and all through Bob McNeal.  Now do be a good girl, and take my advice and never invite him to call again; because I tell you, Esther, that trouble is coming to you through that young man, for I feel it in my bones.”

“Well, Olive, I will tell you the truth; the fact is that—­why here’s Jane!  Why, Jane, what has brought you home at this time of day?  It is only eleven, and dinner won’t be ready for an hour.”

Jane, who had just taken off her hat and hung it up in the hall, replied, “that as there was nothing more to be done at Dunlap’s until the afternoon, she thought she might as well be at home attending to her plants as at the shop.”

After looking at Esther and Olive a moment, she said, “What were you two putting your heads together about when I came in?  Esther stopped talking as soon as she saw me, and Olive, I noticed that you went to the stove and poured so much water into the tea-kettle from the bucket that it ran over, just because you were looking at me instead of at the kettle.  You are both up to something, I know you are.  Now come, tell me all about it; is it a great secret?  I won’t tell anybody; tell me, do.”

Esther, who has just finished paring the potatoes and is now putting them on the stove to boil, takes a seat in the dining room on the settee and has one of her sulky moods, during which she always declines to speak when spoken to.

Jane looks at her a second and then says in a playful manner, “Oh, it’s all right, Esther, I can guess what it was; what nonsense.  I’ll go and attend to my plants.  Why, I declare it’s a quarter past eleven already, and I have got to comb my hair before dinner, too.  Oh! my, how time flies!”

So off Jane goes to her plants in the parlor, leaving Esther in the dining room and Olive in the kitchen getting dinner ready as fast as she can.

Olive had just gone behind the kitchen door that leads into the yard to get another stick of wood for the fire when she was startled by a scream; she feels instinctively that one of her children is in danger, and she is right, for little George has just been saved from a horrible death by Maud Weldon, their next door neighbor.  The little scamp had managed to crawl through the fence and get as far as the middle of the street, when Maud saw him, and was just in time to prevent him from being run over by a heavy wagon drawn by a pair of horses that were being driven at a breakneck pace past the house.  Of course the fair Maud screamed, young women generally do at such times; but