l of his equilibrium, he
clasped the allegedly injured member in his chubby hand and rolled over on
the bed in apparent anguish.

"Less see, Jimmy," asked his mother, anxiously.

"Don't bleeve him, mammy. He 'ain't ever cried. He'd a cried, for sure, if
his toe was sore." At the age of five, little Judith, namesake of her
aunt, was something of a doubting Thomas.

"Let mammy see, Jimmy," and Alida bent over her son and heir.

"Doth Dimmy det any apple?" The wee man sometimes succeeded in making
terms with his mother, when the other children were not present. Though
feeling himself a trifle over-confident, he held the disputed toe with the
air of one keeping back a trump card, and looked his mother squarely in
the eyes.

She struggled with the temptation to give him the apple. He had lifted the
horrors of her dream as nothing else could have done, but she answered him
with quiet firmness.

"Jimmy must not tell stories."

"Less see," insisted Topeka.

"He dassent," affirmed Judith, junior, of little faith.

"It hurths me," and Jimmy tried to squeeze out a tear. "It hurths me, my
tore toe!"

His mother tipped him over on his fat little back and opened the chubby
hand that held the trump toe. It was white from the pressure applied by
the infant dissembler, but there was no trace of the treacherous cactus
thorn. She gave him an affectionate spank and went into the kitchen to
make coffee.

"I with I had a tore toe," he crooned, quite unabashed at the discovery of
his deception. "I with I toud det a tore toe 'thout the hurt."

But the horror of the dream gripped her when she found herself alone in
the kitchen; and she remembered she had not told the children not to go
into the room where their father was sleeping. She went back and found
that Jimmy had not left his post on the side of the bed, where he still
regretted that his perfectly well toe did not entitle him to gastronomic
consideration. Topeka, who had arrived at an age where little girls, in
the first subconscious attempt at adornment, know no keener delight than
plastering their heads with a wet hairbrush, till they present an
appearance of slippery rotundity equalled only by a peeled onion, put down
the brush with guilty haste at sight of her mother.

"I'm goin' to dress him soon as I've done my hair."

"Any one think you was goin' to be married, the time you've took to it."

"It's gettin' so long," urged Topeka.

"I wouldn't give it a chance to