round her
neck to hold her bonnet on. She put her hat and cloak on the hall
table, to be carried upstairs later, and they all went in to tea:
creamed oysters, birds, hot biscuit, two kinds of cake, and dishes of
stewed and canned fruit and honey. The women dined alone at one, and
the Colonel at the same hour down-town. But he liked a good hot meal
when he got home in the evening. The house flared with gas; and the
Colonel, before he sat down, went about shutting the registers, through
which a welding heat came voluming up from the furnace.

"I'll be the death of that darkey YET," he said, "if he don't stop
making on such a fire. The only way to get any comfort out of your
furnace is to take care of it yourself."

"Well," answered his wife from behind the teapot, as he sat down at
table with this threat, "there's nothing to prevent you, Si. And you
can shovel the snow too, if you want to--till you get over to Beacon
Street, anyway."

"I guess I can keep my own sidewalk on Beacon Street clean, if I take
the notion."

"I should like to see you at it," retorted his wife.

"Well, you keep a sharp lookout, and may be you will."

Their taunts were really expressions of affectionate pride in each
other. They liked to have it, give and take, that way, as they would
have said, right along.

"A man can be a man on Beacon Street as well as anywhere, I guess."

"Well, I'll do the wash, as I used to in Lumberville," said Mrs.
Lapham. "I presume you'll let me have set tubs, Si. You know I ain't
so young any more." She passed Irene a cup of Oolong tea,--none of them
had a sufficiently cultivated palate for Sou-chong,--and the girl
handed it to her father. "Papa," she asked, "you don't really mean
that you're going to build over there?"

"Don't I? You wait and see," said the Colonel, stirring his tea.

"I don't believe you do," pursued the girl.

"Is that so? I presume you'd hate to have me. Your mother does." He
said DOOS, of course.

Penelope took the word. "I go in for it. I don't see any use in not
enjoying money, if you've got it to enjoy. That's what it's for, I
suppose; though you mightn't always think so." She had a slow, quaint
way of talking, that seemed a pleasant personal modification of some
ancestral Yankee drawl, and her voice was low and cozy, and so far from
being nasal that it was a little hoarse.

"I guess the ayes has it, Pen," said her father. "How would it do to
let Irene and your mot