subsided into a deep and pathetic quiet, with that air peculiar to the
victims of her disorder of having done nothing noticeable. But her
outburst had set at work the mysterious machinery of half a dozen other
whooping-coughers lurking about the building, and all unseen they wound
themselves up with appalling rapidity, and in the utter silence which
followed left one to think they had died at the climax.

"Why, it's a perfect whooping-cough factory, this place," cries Cousin
Lucy in a desperation. "Go away, do, please, from the baby, you poor
little dreadful object you," she continues, turning upon the only visible
operative in the establishment. "Here, take this," and she bribes her with
a bit of sponge-cake, on which the child runs lightly off along the edge
of the wharf. "That's been another of their projects for driving me wild,"
says Cousin Lucy,--"trying to take their own lives in a hundred ways
before my face and eyes. Why _will_ their mothers let them come here
to play?"

Really, they were very melancholy little figures, and might have gone near
to make one sad, even if they had not been constantly imperilling their
lives. Thanks to its being summer-time, it did not much matter about the
scantiness of their clothing, but their squalor was depressing, it seemed,
even to themselves, for they were a mournful-looking set of children, and
in their dangerous sports trifled silently and almost gloomily with death.
There were none of them above eight or nine years of age, and most of them
had the care of smaller brothers, or even babes in arms, whom they were
thus early inuring to the perils of the situation. The boys were dressed
in pantaloons and shirts which no excess of rolling up in the legs and
arms could make small enough, and the incorrigible too-bigness of which
rendered the favorite amusements still more hazardous from their liability
to trip and entangle the wearers. The little girls had on each a solitary