Caroline was touched and grateful, but could hardly keep a little satire out of her promise that Essie and Ellie should not be too precocious.  She wrote her note of thanks, despatched it, and then, in the interest of some arithmetical problems which she was working with Janet, forgot everything else, till a sort of gigantic buzz was heard near at hand.  A sudden thought struck her, and out she darted into the hall.  There stood the basket in the middle of the table, just where the boys were wont to look for refections of fruit or cake when they tumbled in from school.  Six boys and Babie hovered round, each in the act of devouring a golden-green, egg-like plum, and only two or three remained in the leaves at the bottom!

“Oh, the magnum bonums!” she cried; and Janet came rushing out in dismay at the sound, standing aghast, but not exclaiming.

“Weren’t they for us?” asked Bobus, the first to get the stone out of his mouth.

“No; oh, no!” answered his mother, as well as laughter would permit; “they are your aunt’s precious plums, which she gave us as a great favour, and I was going to be so good and learn to preserve and pickle them!  Oh, dear!”

“Never mind, Mother Carey,” mumbled her nephew Johnny, with his stone swelling out his cheek, where it was tucked for convenience of speech; “I’ll go and get you another jolly lot more.”

“You can’t,” grunted Robin; “they are all gathered.”

“Then we’ll get them off the old tree at the bottom of the orchard, where they are just as big and yellow, and mamma will never know the difference.”

“But they taste like soap!”

“That doesn’t matter.  She’d no more taste a magnum bonum, before it is all titivated up with sugar, than-—than-—than-—”

“Babie’s head with brain sauce,” gravely put in Bobus, as his cousin paused for a comparison.  “It’s a wasting of good gifts to make jam of these, for jam is nothing but a vehicle for sugar.”

“Then the grocer’s cart is jam,” promptly retorted Armine, “for I saw a sugarloaf come in one yesterday.”

“Come on, then,” cried Jock, ripe for the mischief; “I know the tree!  They are just like long apricots.  Aunt Ellen will think her plums have been all a-growing!”

“No, no, boys!” cried his mother, “I can’t have it done.  To steal your aunt’s own plums to deceive her with!”

“We always may do as we like with that tree,” said Johnny, “because they are so nasty, and won’t keep.”

“How nice for the preserves!” observed Bobus.

“They would do just as well to hinder Mother Carey from catching it.”

“No, no, boys; I ought to ‘catch it!’ It was all my fault for not putting the plums away.”

“You won’t tell of us,” growled Robin, between lips that he opened wide enough the next moment to admit one of three surviving plums.

“If I tell her I left them about in the boys’ way, she will arrive at the natural conclusion.”