their mother
had once read, and expressed about the only "foolishness" of which the
busy woman had ever been guilty.

"Ivanora! Idelia! Truck and dicker! Why, Mary wife, such names will
handicap the babies from the start. Who can imagine an Ivanora making
bread? or an Idelia scrubbing a floor? But, however, if it pleases
you, all right, though I do think a sensible Susan or Hannah would be
more useful to girls of our walk in life."

"Oh! I don't object to those either. Let's put them on behind the
pretty ones; and maybe they'll not have to scrub floors or make
bread, the sweet darlings," answered the wife, when soon after the
babies' birth the important matter of naming them arose.

At the moment when the father and Molly were watching the storm from
one small window, while the three Jays and Sarah Jane occupied the
other, these youngest members of the big family were seated upon a
gray blanket behind the stove. They had been placed there by their
careful mother, as a safeguard against cold and exposure, and in
dangerous proximity to a pan of bread dough which had been set to
rise. It was due to the excitement of the storm that, for once, their
mother forgot them; and it was not till she called, "All hands round!"
and the family filed into place about the big table that she
remembered them; or, rather, had her attention called to them by Sarah
Jane, the caretaker of the household.

"Oh! mother Johns! the twins! the twins!"

"Bless me! the twins, indeed! the bread-maker's beginning early, Mary
wife!" laughed the plumber.

"Oh! oh! oh! you naughty dears! You naughty, naughty dears! To think
that great big girls, almost two years old, should waste mother's
nice dough like that!"

The pair had plunged their fat little arms deep in the soft, yielding
mass and plucked handfuls of it, to smear upon each other's faces and
curls; and what remained in the raiser had been plentifully dotted
with bits of coal from the near-by hod. They looked so funny, and were
themselves so hilarious with glee over their own mischief, that there
was nothing left for their elders to do except join in the general
merriment.

But Mrs. Johns' face sobered soon.

"It's a pity, it's a pity. All that good bread gone to do nobody any
good, when there are so many hungry people will be needing food before
this storm's over. And we almost out of flour, too."

"Seems to me we're almost always out of flour--or shoes!" laughed the
father. "And it