greatest kind of joke on mamma, and one that she would like as much
as anybody. The thing was to keep it from her till it was done, and they
all promised that they wouldn't tell; but I could see that they were
bursting with the secret the whole evening.

"The next day was Saturday, when I always went home early, and I had the
two oldest children come in with the second-girl, who left them to take
lunch with me. They had chocolate and ice-cream, and after lunch we
went around to a milliner's shop in West Street, where my wife and I had
stopped a long five minutes the week before we went to Bethlehem,
adoring an Easter bonnet that we saw in the window. I wanted her to buy
it; but she said, No, if we were going that expensive journey, we
couldn't afford it, and she must do without, that spring. I showed it to
them, and 'Now, children,' I said, 'what do you think of that for the
chick that your Easter egg hatched?' And they said it was the most
beautiful bonnet they had ever seen, and it would just exactly suit
mamma. But I saw they were holding something back, and I said, sharply,
'Well?' and they both guiltily faltered out: 'The _bird_, you know,
papa,' and I remembered that they belonged to the society of Bird
Defenders, who in that day were pledged against the decorative use of
dead birds or killing them for anything but food. 'Why, confound it,' I
said, 'the bird is the very thing that makes it an Easter-egg chick!'
but I saw that their honest little hearts were troubled, and I said
again: 'Confound it! Let's go in and hear what the milliner has to say.'
Well, the long and short of it was that the milliner tried a bunch of
forget-me-nots over the bluebird that we all agreed was a thousand times
better, and that if it were substituted would only cost three dollars
more, and we took our Easter-egg chick home in a blaze of glory, the
children carrying the bandbox by the string between them.

"Of course we had a great time opening it, and their mother acted her
part so well that I knew she was acting, and after the little ones were
in bed I taxed her with it. 'Know? Of course I knew!' she said. 'Did you
think they would let you _deceive_ me? They're true New-Englanders, and
they told me all about it last night, when I was saying their prayers
with them.' 'Well,' I said, 'they let you deceive _me_; they must be
true Westerners, too, for they didn't tell me a word of your knowing.' I
rather had her there, but she said: 'Oh,