puncheon and grabbed the kitten and pulled. You
were always a great hand for taking what you wanted without too much
ceremony. Walter held on tight and the poor kitten yelled but you
dragged Walter and the kitten half over and then you both lost your
balance and tumbled into that puncheon, kitten and all. If I had not
been on the spot you would both have been drowned. I flew to the rescue
and hauled you all three out before much harm was done, and your
mother, who had seen it all from the upstairs window, came down and
picked you up, dripping as you were, and gave you a beautiful spanking.
Ah," said Susan with a sigh, "those were happy old days at Ingleside."

"Must have been," said Ken. His voice sounded queer and stiff. Rilla
supposed he was hopelessly enraged. The truth was he dared not trust
his voice lest it betray his frantic desire to laugh.

"Rilla here, now," said Susan, looking affectionately at that unhappy
damsel, "never was much spanked. She was a real well-behaved child for
the most part. But her father did spank her once. She got two bottles
of pills out of his office and dared Alice Clow to see which of them
could swallow all the pills first, and if her father had not happened
in the nick of time those two children would have been corpses by
night. As it was, they were both sick enough shortly after. But the
doctor spanked Rilla then and there and he made such a thorough job of
it that she never meddled with anything in his office afterwards. We
hear a great deal nowadays of something that is called 'moral
persuasion,' but in my opinion a good spanking and no nagging
afterwards is a much better thing."

Rilla wondered viciously whether Susan meant to relate all the family
spankings. But Susan had finished with the subject and branched off to
another cheerful one.

"I remember little Tod MacAllister over-harbour killed himself that
very way, eating up a whole box of fruitatives because he thought they
were candy. It was a very sad affair. He was," said Susan earnestly,
"the very cutest little corpse I ever laid my eyes on. It was very
careless of his mother to leave the fruitatives where he could get
them, but she was well-known to be a heedless creature. One day she
found a nest of five eggs as she was going across the fields to church
with a brand new blue silk dress on. So she put them in the pocket of
her petticoat and when she got to church she forgot all about them and
sat down on them and her d