Mrs. Slawson closed the gate after her with care. "I'll just step
light," she said to herself, "an' steal in on 'em unbeknownst, an' give
'em as good a scare as ever they had in their lives--the whole lazy lot
of 'em."

But, like Mother Hubbard's cupboard, the kitchen was bare, and no soul
was to be found in the laundry, the pantry or, in fact, anywhere
throughout the basement region. Softly, and with some real misgiving
now, Martha made her way upstairs. Here, for the first time, she
distinguished the sound of a human voice breaking the early morning hush
of the silent house. It was Radcliffe's voice issuing, evidently, from
the dining-room, in which imposing apartment he chose to have his
breakfast served in solitary grandeur every morning, what time the rest
of his family still slept.

Martha, pausing on her way up, peeped around the edge of the half-closed
door, and then stopped short.

Along the wall, ranged up in line, like soldiers facing their captain,
or victims of a hold-up their captor, stood the household
servants--portly Shaw the butler, Beatrice the parlor-maid, Eliza the
"chef-cook"--all, down to the gay young sprig, aforesaid, who, as Martha
had explained to her family in strong disapproval, "was engaged to do
scullerywork, an' then didn't even know how to scull." Before them, in
an attitude of command, not to say menace, stood Radcliffe, brandishing
a carving-knife which, in his cruelly mischievous little hand, became a
weapon full of dangerous possibilities.

"Don't dare to budge, any one of you," he breathed masterfully to his