ir dressing.

"Oh, Billy! if you don't look just as if you had a lot of little feather
dusters growing on your head!" she cried, holding on to her sides as
she laughed.

Billy looked disturbed. He decidedly objected to being laughed at. He
put up his hand to feel.

"Don't take them down," said Cricket, pushing his hand away. "I'm going
on. My! what a lot of hair people have. Let's see how many bunches I
have. Twenty-two--twenty-three. That makes twenty-three hundred, and
there's lots more to do, yet. I don't wonder people mean so much when
they say, as many as the hairs of your head, do you?"

"How many, Cricket?" asked auntie, laughing, as she and grandma drew
nearer.

"Who's that? Oh, auntie!" Cricket looked a little abashed. "I'm only
counting Billy's hair," she explained. "Mr. Clark said this morning
that, if we counted our mercies, we should find them as many as the
hairs of our heads."

"It might be easier to count the mercies," said auntie, still laughing.

"Yes, I thought of that coming home from church," said Cricket, going on
with her work of gathering up wisps of Billy's hair into plumes, and
fastening them by the bands, though without counting. "Then I didn't
know exactly what my mercies are, excepting that 'Liza says it is a
mercy I'm not twins."

"What had you been doing when she said that, Jean?" immediately asked
grandma, who never used her nickname.

"Nothing, much," said Cricket, "only 'Liza gets cranky sometimes, you
know."

"That won't do, Cricket," said Auntie Jean, scenting mischief. "Tell me
what you did."

"Really, it wasn't much. It was this morning, and 'Liza had Helen in the
bath-tub bathing her, and I went into the nursery a moment, and Zaidee
was in bed, and she said her leg hurt her, and 'Liza was going to rub it
with 'Pond's Extrap,'--that's what she calls Pond's Extract, you know,"
taking breath,--"and I only meant to help 'Liza, really and truly. So I
took down the bottle and began to rub Zaidee's legs. I thought the
Pond's Extract seemed to have gotten dreadfully sticky, and it was all
thick and dark like molasses, and I could hardly rub at all with it, and
Zaidee said she didn't like it, and she cried. But I thought it was the
best thing to do for her, so I told her a story to keep her quiet, till
I got both her legs all rubbed. Then 'Liza came in, and wanted to know
what made Zaidee's legs so sticky, and the sheets and her nightdress
were pretty bad, because she wiggled