"What's the matter?" aunt would ask.

"The day before yesterday's!" he would answer, too hurt even to shout,
throwing the paper down upon the table.

If only sometimes it had been yesterday's it would have been a change.
But it was always the day before yesterday's; except on Tuesday; then it
would be Saturday's.

We would find it for him eventually; as often as not he was sitting on
it. And then he would smile, not genially, but with the weariness that
comes to a man who feels that fate has cast his lot among a band of
hopeless idiots.

"All the time, right in front of your noses--!" He would not finish the
sentence; he prided himself on his self-control.

This settled, he would start for the hall, where it was the custom of my
Aunt Maria to have the children gathered, ready to say good-bye to him.

My aunt never left the house herself, if only to make a call next door,
without taking a tender farewell of every inmate. One never knew, she
would say, what might happen.

One of them, of course, was sure to be missing, and the moment this was
noticed all the other six, without an instant's hesitation, would scatter
with a whoop to find it. Immediately they were gone it would turn up by
itself from somewhere quite near, always with the most reasonable
explanation for its absence; and would at once start off after the others
to explain to them that it was found. In this way, five minutes at least