"So she is," said faithful Jem. "Lack-a-daisy-dee! Lack-a-daisy-dee!"
and he wriggled about after me, and knocked over the Berlin
wool-basket.

"Oh dear, oh dear!" said our poor mother.

Jem righted the basket, and I took a run and a flying leap over it, and
having cleared it successfully, took another, and yet another, each one
soothing my feelings to the extent by which it shocked my mother's. At
the third bound, Jem, not to be behindhand, uttered a piercing yell from
behind the sofa.

"Good gracious, what's the matter?" cried my mother.

"It's the war-whoop of the Objibeway Indians," I promptly explained, and
having emitted another, to which I flattered myself Jem's had been as
nothing for hideousness, we departed in file to raise a row in the
kitchen.

Summer passed into autumn. Jem and I really liked going to school, but
it was against our principles at that time to allow that we liked
anything that we ought to like.

Some sincere but mistaken efforts to improve our principles were made, I
remember, by a middle-aged single lady, who had known my mother in her
girlhood, and who was visiting her at this unlucky stage of our career.
Having failed to cope with us directly, she adopted the plan of talking
improvingly to our mother and at us, and very severe some of her
remarks were, and I don't believe that Mother liked them any better