cooking class; and Sarah will dry them for us."

"I will, if Kitty will," qualified Sarah, hastily, having no mind to be
tied down to domestic duties while someone else played.

"Kitty is in bed," said Louisa severely. "I told her to make the beds
yesterday and she never touched one. She said she forgot. So now she
has to stay in bed till dinner time to make her remember."

"I'm going to get up now, Louisa!" shrilled the wrathful voice of Kitty
from the upstairs hall.

"You go back to bed and stay there, till I tell you you can get up,"
directed Louisa. "Unless you want to be locked in your room and your
dinner."

Kitty retreated--they heard the door of room slam--and Louisa went on
with her plate scraping.

"There's the baby!" Louisa started nervously. "Kenneth must have
stopped rocking her."

At that moment Kenneth appeared in the kitchen doorway, looking
distinctly cross.

"I don't see why I always have to rock the baby!" he grumbled. "Alec
wants me to stake Dora down by the brook and when am I going to get any
time to help him if I have to keep June quiet?"

"Let me rock her," said Shirley. "I can rock just as nice--can't I,
Rosemary?"

"Well, I think you could," admitted Rosemary, smiling. "You must touch
the cradle very gently, you know, Shirley--don't rock June as though
she were in a boat at sea."

She went in to the darkened room off the kitchen with Shirley and
showed her how to sway the old-fashioned cradle with a soothing motion.
When she came back to Louisa, Kenneth had disappeared and Sarah with
him.

"I declare, sometimes I get so discouraged, I don't know what to do,"
confided Louisa, filling the heavy tea kettle at the sink and lifting
it to the stove. "We do everything the wrong way and yet I don't see
where we can take time to do them any better.

"For instance, there's June. I know she shouldn't be rocked to
sleep--but the one day I tried to break her of the habit and make her
go to sleep quietly by herself, I didn't get a thing done. The other
children got into mischief, Alec was hurt trying to pitch hay and
manage the team without help and, after all, June didn't learn a thing.
She acted worse the next day, so I had to give it up and go back to the
cradle rocking."

"I suppose it is hard because she is used to the cradle now," said
Rosemary, busily clearing a place on the table for the clean dishes.

"Yes, that's the reason," agreed Louisa. "And we spend a lot of tim