Checking an exclamation of horror father started forward, to meet
Richard's cheerful, frank gaze and the request, as he dug away
persistently, to "Please wait one minute more, dranpa. I've got the heart
all done, that big floppy piece is lungs, an' I've most made the liver.
Not the good kind that goes wif curly bacon, but a nasty one like what we
wear inside."

Then spying a medical chart with coloured pictures that was propped up
against the wood box, father found the clew, and comprehended that
Richard was giving himself a practical lesson in anatomy by trying to
carve these organs from a huge mangel wurzel beet that he had rolled in
from the root cellar. Did father scold him for mess-making, or laugh at
his attempt that had little shape except in his own baby brain?

No, neither; he carefully closed the door against Martha's possible
entrance, seriously and respectfully put the precious objects on a plate,
to which he gave a place of honour on the mantel shelf, and after
removing as far as possible all traces of beet from face and hands in his
sacred office lavatory, he took Richard with him into the depths of the
great chair and told the happy child his favourite rigmarole, all about
the "three gentlemen of high degree," who do our housework for us. How
the lungs, who are Siamese twins, called to the heart to pump them up
some blood to air, because they were almost out of work, and how the big
lazy liver lay on one side and groaned because he had drunk too much
coffee for breakfast, and had a headache,--until Richard really felt that
he had achieved something. So the first thing this morning he set about
making a snow man, that he might put the beet vitals in their proper
places, nearly convulsing father by their location. Though, as he told
me, they were accurate, compared to the ideas of many trained nurses with
whom he had come in contact.