Pearl went around to the side lawn where the girls were playing croquet, holding the czar’s hand tightly.

“What are you playin’?” she asked.

They told her.

“Can you play it?” Mildred Bates asked.

“I guess I can,” Pearl said modestly.  “But I’m always too busy for games like that!”

“Maudie Ducker says you never play,” Mildred Bates said with pity in her voice.

“Maudie Ducker is away off there,” Pearl answered with dignity.  “I have more fun in one day than Maudie Ducker’ll ever have if she lives to be as old as Melchesidick, and it’s not this frowsy standin’-round-doin’-nothin’ that you kids call fun either.”

“Tell us about it, Pearl,” they shouted eagerly.  Pearl’s stories had a charm.

“Well,” Pearl began, “ye know I wash Mrs. Evans’s dishes every day, and lovely ones they are, too, all pink and gold with dinky little ivy leaves crawlin’ out over the edges of the cups.  I play I am at the seashore and the tide is comin’ in o’er and o’er the sand and ’round and ’round the land, far as eye can see—­that’s out of a book.  I put all the dishes into the big dish pan, and I pertend the tide is risin’ on them, though it’s just me pourin’ on the water.  The cups are the boys and the saucers are the girls, the plates are the fathers and mothers and the butter chips are the babies.  Then I rush in to save them, but not until they cry ’Lord save us, we perish!’ Of course, I yell it for them, good and loud too—­people don’t just squawk at a time like that—­it often scares Mrs. Evans even yet.  I save the babies first, I slush them around to clean them, but they never notice that, and I stand them up high and dry in the drip-pan.  Then I go in after the girls, and they quiet down the babies in the drip-pan; and then the mothers I bring out, and the boys and the fathers.  Sometimes some of the men make a dash out before the women, but you bet I lay them back in a hurry.  Then I set the ocean back on the stove, and I rub the babies to get their blood circlin’ again, and I get them all put to bed on the second shelf and they soon forget they were so near death’s door.”

Mary Ducker had finished the “Java March” and “Mary’s Pet Waltz,” and had joined the interested group on the lawn and now stood listening in dull wonder.

“I rub them all and shine them well,” Pearl went on, “and get them all packed off home into the china cupboard, every man jack o’ them singin’ ’Are we yet alive and see each other’s face,’ Mrs. Evans sings it for them when she’s there.

“Then I get the vegetable dishes and bowls and silverware and all that, and that’s an excursion, and they’re all drunk, not a sober man on board.  They sing ‘Sooper up old boys,’ ‘We won’t go home till mornin’ and all that, and crash! a cry bursts from every soul on board.  They have struck upon a rock and are going down!  Water pours in at the gunnel (that’s just me with more water and soap, you know), but I ain’t