“And I’ll help you fix up the store,” Rosie said with enthusiasm.  “I just love to make things look pretty.”

“It’s a bargain then,” Maida said.  “And now you must teach me how to help you this very afternoon, Dicky.”

They fell to work with a vim.  At least three of them did.  Rosie continued to frisk with Delia and Tag on the floor.  Dicky started Maida on the caps first.  He said that those were the easiest.  And, indeed she had very little trouble with anything until she came to the boxes.  She had to do her first box over and over again before it would come right.  But Dicky was very patient with her.  He kept telling her that she did better than most beginners or she would have given it up.  When she made her first good box, her face beamed with satisfaction.

“Do you mind if I take it home, Dicky?” she asked.  “I’d like to show it to my father when he comes.  It’s the first thing I ever made in my life.”

“Of course,” Dicky said.

“Don’t the other children ever try to copy your things?” Maida asked.

“They try to,” Arthur answered, “but they never do so well as Dicky.”

“You ought to see their nose-pinchers,” Rosie laughed.  “They can’t stand up straight.  And their boxes and steamships are the wobbliest things.”

“I’m going to get all kinds of stuff for things we make for the fair,” Maida said reflectively.  “Gold and silver paper and colored stars and pretty fancy pictures for trimmings.  You see if you’re going to charge real money you must make them more beautiful than those for which you only charged nails.”

“That’s right,” Dicky said.  “By George, that will be great!  You go ahead and buy whatever you think is right, Maida, and I’ll pay you for it from what we take in at the fair.”

“That’s settled.  What do you whittle, Arthur?”

“Oh, all kinds of things—­things I made up myself and things I learned how to do in sloyd in school.  I make bread-boards and rolling pins and shinny sticks and cats and little baskets out of cherry-stones.”

“Jiminy crickets, he’s forgetting the boats,” Dicky burst in enthusiastically.  “He makes the dandiest boats you ever saw in your life.”

Maida looked at Arthur in awe.  “I never heard anything like it!  Can you make anything for girls?”

“Made me a set of the darlingest dolls’ furniture you ever saw in your life,” Rosie put in from the floor.

“Say, did you get into any trouble last night?” Arthur turned suddenly to Rosie.  “I forgot to ask you.”

“Arthur and Rosie hooked jack yesterday, in all that rain,” Dicky explained to Maida.  “They knew a place where they could get a whole lot of old iron and they were afraid if they waited, it would be gone.”