bout card houses."

"What's that?" asked Fanny, pursing up her mouth and trying to look as
if she knew already.

"Why, I'll tell you," answered Sallie, taking a long breath for the
prodigious long word that was coming, "if you ever expect to build card
houses, or cocked hats, or steamboats, you must go to work
_systimystiattically_."

"That's not the word," said Fanny, looking as dignified as ten judges;
"that's not the word at all, Sallie."

"What is it, then?" said Sallie, shutting one eye, and looking very hard
at Fanny with the other.

"_Sister Mister Macalley!_ There! don't I know?"

"My dear child," answered Sallie, with a patronizing air, and her head
on one side, "you are right. It is _Sister Mister Macalley_; I only
said _systimystiattically_ for fun, you know--just for fun and fancy,
old Aunt Nancy." And the little girls laughed merrily, and thought it a
capital joke.

Sallie's mother had to laugh too, until she was almost killed, at this
last sally. She did not wonder that the long word "_systematically_" had
proved one too many for the children; she expected, the next thing, to
hear of "indivisibility," or "incompatibility," or something twice as
long, if possible; but, at any rate, the laughing or something else did
her so much good that she felt well enough to get up and drink a cup of
tea and eat a piece of dry toast, while the little girls were having
their luncheon, and desperate were the efforts she was obliged to make,
to keep from laughing at the speeches they made over the meal. They were
twenty times more amusing than the heavy, long-winded jokes with which
aldermen, and other big bugs entertain each other for hours at the
great public dinners, where they are obliged to give each other the wink
to let every one know _where the laugh ought to come in_. No! it was
just one little, rollicking, chuckling laugh all lunch time; and how
they managed to make so much bread and butter and raspberry jam
disappear, I am sure I cannot tell.

Sallie lived in the city of New York, in Eleventh street, very near
Broadway. Directly round the corner was Mrs. Wagner's ice cream saloon,
or, as Sallie called it, "Mrs. Waggles."

In the afternoon her mother said she and Fanny might go, by themselves,
to this saloon, and buy each a treat of six-pence worth of ice cream.

The children were in a perfect ecstasy of delight at this announcement;
their faces were radiant with good humor and happiness. Only to think