and ate but a hasty and indifferent breakfast so that she might
the sooner begin to prepare their meal. The ducks had been regaled
of late on the minced remains of all the family meals, Alix
spending an additional half-hour at the table while she cut fruit-
rinds, cold biscuits, and vegetables into small pieces, for her
gluttonous pensioners.

"Wait for the ten o'clock train, Pete, and go in with Cherry!"
said Alix, holding a small piece of omelet close to the nose of
the importunate Buck. "Go on, be a sport!--DON'T YOU DARE," she
added, to the dog, who rolled restless and entreating eyes, banged
his tail on the floor, and allowed a faint, disconsolate whimper
to escape him. "I don't think I'll go in," she explained, "for I
have about a week's work here to do. Those Italian boys are coming
up to thin the lettuce, and Kow is going to put up the peaches,
and if you both are gone I can have a regular orgy of
housekeeping--really, I'd rather. Here, take it--the dear old
Buckboy--well, did he get so mad he couldn't see out of his eyes!"
she added, affectionately, to Buck, as the omelet disappeared with
one snap of his jaws. She folded his two fringed ears into his
eyes, and laid her face against his shining head. "Well, this
isn't feeding the ducks!" she finished, jumping up. "Come see
them, Pietro, they're too darling!"

"They're extremely dirty and messy," Peter complained, following
with Cherry nevertheless, to see her scatter her chopped food
carelessly on the surface of the little pond, the struggling
bodies of the ducklings, and the bobbing downy heads alike. With
quacking and wriggling and dabbling, the meal was eaten, and Alix,
scraping the bowls for last fragments, and blinking in a flood of