them going, such as sitting in a
draught; and David found he could blow them about the room like pieces
of paper. You could see by the shortness of Josy's dress that she was
very young indeed, and at first this made him shy, as he always is when
introduced formally to little girls, and he stood sucking his thumb, and
so did she, but soon the stiffness wore off and they sat together on the
sofa, holding each other's hands.

All this time the harlequin was rotating like a beautiful fish, and
David requested him to jump through the wall, at which he is such an
adept, and first he said he would, and then he said better not, for the
last time he did it the people in the next house had made such a fuss.
David had to admit that it must be rather startling to the people on the
other side of the wall, but he was sorry.

By this time tea was ready, and Josy, who poured out, remembered to ask
if you took milk with just one drop of tea in it, exactly as her mother
would have asked. There was nothing to eat, of course, except sausages,
but what a number of them there were! hundreds at least, strings of
sausages, and every now and then Joey jumped up and played skipping rope
with them. David had been taught not to look greedy, even though he felt
greedy, and he was shocked to see the way in which Joey and old Joey
and even Josy eyed the sausages they had given him. Soon Josy developed
nobler feelings, for she and Joeykin suddenly fell madly in love with
each other across the table, but unaffected by this pretty picture, Joey
continued to put whole sausages in his mouth at a time, and then rubbed
himself a little lower down, while old Joey secreted them about his
person; and when David wasn't looking they both pounced on his sausages,
and yet as they gobbled they were constantly running to the top of the
stair and screaming to the servant to bring up more sausages.

You could see that Joey (if you caught him with his hand in your plate)
was a bit ashamed of himself, and he admitted to us that sausages were a
passion with him.

He said he had never once in his life had a sufficient number of
sausages. They had maddened him since he was the smallest boy. He told
us how, even in those days, his mother had feared for him, though fond
of a sausage herself; how he had bought a sausage with his first penny,
and hoped to buy one with his last (if they could not be got in any
other way), and that he always slept with a string of them beneat