nt window!"

* * * * *

As a Madigan, Frances should have been above fear. She was--except of
the tank in the back room up-stairs. Its gurglings and chucklings were
more than mortal four-years-old could bear at night in the dark,
particularly after Bep had taught her to be superstitious.

Bep's nature was spongy with a capacity for saturation. She took in
every new child fad and folly. She believed in a multiplicity of
remedies, and was ready to try a new one--on somebody else--whenever the
occasion offered. When Frank got the whooping-cough, and used to march
around the dining-room table, stamping in her paroxysms of coughing and
of speechless anger at the Madigans who followed mimicking her, Bep
decided that she would try the latest cure she had heard of. So she
wandered down to the gas-works one day, Frank's hand in hers, to give
her patient the benefit of breathing the heavily charged atmosphere down
there.

"How-do, Mrs. Grayson?" she greeted the gas-man's wife amiably, as she
opened the kitchen door.

Mrs. Grayson, her babies leaving her side to cluster interestedly around
Frank, replied that she and the children were well; that the epidemic of
whooping-cough had not reached them because they lived so far out of
town.

"Yes," assented Bep, politely; "and then, the smell of gas is so good
for whooping-cough. That keeps 'em well. And that's why I brought Frank
down here."

Mrs. Grayson's excitable motherhood took alarm. "I never heard," she
said quickly, "that breathing in coal-tar smells kept off
whooping-cough."

"No, neither did I, though p'r'aps it does. But it cures--I know that."

"You don't mean to say--" Mrs. Grayson flew like a terrified hen for her
chicks, lifting two by an arm each clear from the ground and hustling
the third into the kitchen before her.

"Yep, she's got it," said Bep, proudly. And Frank, feeling called upon
to be interesting, burst into a convulsive corroboration of the glad
tidings.

"You nasty little minx!" exclaimed Mrs. Grayson, as she shut the door in
Bep's face.

"What's 'minx'?" Frank asked her sister, as they toiled up toward town
again.

"Oh, it's a wild animal," answered Bep, readily; "but she don't know how
to say it. She's going to have bad luck, though; anybody can tell that
by the way she walked under that ladder. I shouldn't be a bit surprised
if every last one of her children gets the whooping-cough!"

And Frank felt sorr