than he does? You would use wrong words, and put words in the
wrong places, and instead of making people understand you, they would
turn away from you as a tiresome person. What would you do then?"

"I shouldn't care, I should leave off," said Ben, with a sense that
this was an agreeable issue where grammar was concerned.

"I see you are getting tired and stupid, Ben," said Mrs. Garth,
accustomed to these obstructive arguments from her male offspring.
Having finished her pies, she moved towards the clothes-horse, and
said, "Come here and tell me the story I told you on Wednesday, about
Cincinnatus."

"I know! he was a farmer," said Ben.

"Now, Ben, he was a Roman--let _me_ tell," said Letty, using her elbow
contentiously.

"You silly thing, he was a Roman farmer, and he was ploughing."

"Yes, but before that--that didn't come first--people wanted him," said
Letty.

"Well, but you must say what sort of a man he was first," insisted Ben.
"He was a wise man, like my father, and that made the people want his
advice. And he was a brave man, and could fight. And so could my
father--couldn't he, mother?"

"Now, Ben, let me tell the story straight on, as mother told it us,"
said Letty, frowning. "Please, mother, tell Ben not to speak."

"Letty, I am ashamed of you," said her mother, wringing out the caps
from the tub. "When your brother began, you ought to have waited to
see if he could not tell the story. How rude you look, pushing and
frowning, as if you wanted to conquer with your elbows! Cincinnatus, I
am sure, would have been sorry to see his daughter behave so." (Mrs.
Garth delivered this awful sentence with much majesty of enunciation,
and Letty felt that between repressed volubility and general disesteem,
that of the Romans inclusive, life was already a painful affair.) "Now,
Ben."

"Well--oh--well--why, there was a great deal of fighting, and they were
all blockheads, and--I can't tell it just how you told it--but they
wanted a man to be captain and king and everything--"

"Dictator, now," said Letty, with injured looks, and not without a wish
to make her mother repent.

"Very well, dictator!" said Ben, contemptuously. "But that isn't a
good word: he didn't tell them to write on slates."

"Come, come, Ben, you are not so ignorant as that," said Mrs. Garth,
carefully serious. "Hark, there is a knock at the door! Run, Letty,
and open it."

The knock was Fred's; and when Letty said that her