ia is
talking about the Exhibition, and telling how she stayed at home to
receive friends. And they must have had trouble there! Could not you
go in and ask, just as if you wanted to know?"

Agamemnon looked into the room, but there were too many talking with
the lady from Philadelphia.

"If we could only look into some book," he said,--"the encyclopaedia or
the dictionary; they are such a help sometimes!"

At this moment he thought of his "Great Triumphs of Great Men," that
he was reading just now. He had not reached the lives of the
Stephensons, or any of the men of modern times. He might skip over to
them,--he knew they were men for emergencies.

He ran up to his room, and met Solomon John coming down with chairs.

"That is a good thought," said Agamemnon. "I will bring down more
upstairs chairs."

"No," said Solomon John, "here are all that can come down; the rest
of the bedroom chairs match bureaus, and they never will do!"

Agamemnon kept on to his own room, to consult his books. If only he
could invent something on the spur of the moment,--a set of bedroom
furniture, that in an emergency could be turned into parlor chairs! It
seemed an idea; and he sat himself down to his table and pencils, when
he was interrupted by the little boys, who came to tell him that
Elizabeth Eliza wanted him.

The little boys had been busy thinking. They proposed that the
tea-table, with all the things on, should be pushed into the front
room, where the company were; and those could take cups who could find
cups.

But Elizabeth Eliza feared it would not be safe to push so large a
table; it might upset, and break what china they had.

Agamemnon came down to find her pouring out tea, in the back room. She
called to him:--

"Agamemnon, you must bring Mary Osborne to help, and perhaps one of
the Gibbons boys would carry round some of the cups."

And so she began to pour out, and to send round the sandwiches, and
the tea, and the coffee. Let things go as far as they would!

The little boys took the sugar and cream.

"As soon as they have done drinking bring back the cups and saucers to
be washed," she said to the Gibbons boys and the little boys.

This was an idea of Mary Osborne's.

But what was their surprise that the more they poured out the more
cups they seemed to have! Elizabeth Eliza took the coffee, and Mary
Osborne the tea. Amanda brought fresh cups from the kitchen.

"I can't understand it," Elizabeth Eliza s