of rolling rocks.

"Ok-oka-ok-a-a!"

The kitten flew to the other side of the room, and Nora appeared from
the pantry. When she saw the two children on the stairs, she put her
hands on her sides and laughed with her nose. "We've a quare one here,
now, haven't we?" said she.

Polly stretched her lovely head out into the room from the cage, and
flapped her wings, and swung to and fro, and the kitten returned,
whereupon the boy drew up his pigtail and tied it around his neck like
a necktie.

"See, children," said Nora, pointing, "what your mother has brought
home! She says we must all be good to him, and it's never hard I would
be to any living crater. He came down from the sun, he says. What do you
think his name is? And you could never guess! It's Sky-High, which is to
say, come-down-from-the-sun. And a man in a coach it was that brought
him. Sure, I never came here in a coach, but on my two square feet; he
came from the consul's office--Misther Bradley's--and a ship it was that
brought him there. Ah, but he's a quare kitchen-boy!

"But your mother, all with a heart as warm as pudding, she's going to
educate him; and if he does well, she's going to promote him up aloft,
to take care of all the foine rooms, and furniture and things, and to
wait upon the table, and tend the door for aught I know. She made me
promise I would be remarkable good to him--but it don't do no harm for
me to say that he's a quare one! _he_ can't understand it--_he_ speaks
the language of the sun, all like the cracking of nuts, or the rattling
of a loose thunder-storm over the shingles."

"Sky-High?" ventured little Lucy mischievously.

The Chinese boy looked up, with a quick blink of his eyes.

"At your service, madam," said he in very good English.

Nora lifted her great arms.

"And he does speak English! Who knows but he understood all I said, and
what the parrot said too. Poll, you go into your cage! 'At your service,
madam!' And did you hear it, Lucy? No errand-boy ever spoke in the
loikes o' that before! I'd think h'd been brought up among the quality.
It maybe he's a Fairy Shoemaker, spaking the queen's court-language, and
no errand-boy at all!"

A bell sounded up-stairs, and the two children ran back.

"Oh, mother, never was there a boy like that!" said Charlie.

"Well," said Mrs. Van Buren, "you shall tell your father how you found
little Sky-High--it will be a pretty after-supper story. I want you to
think kindly of him, f