pouring out the tea.

"M--m--m--m," said Marmaduke. He meant to say,--"Make mine 'cambric,'
please," for he knew his mother wouldn't have wanted him to take
_regular_ tea, but his Forty White Horses galloped so he couldn't
make himself heard.

"There, little boy," said the Round Fat Rosy Woman, "don't talk. Just
wrap yourself in this blanket and drink this down, and you'll feel
better."

It did taste good even if it was strong, and it warmed him all the way
down under the blue jumper, and the Forty White Horses stopped their
galloping, and while the men were hitching the mules up again, and the
"Mary Ellen" was drifting through the lower pair of gates out of the
Lock, he fell fast asleep.

He must have slept for a whole lot of jiffies. When he woke up at
last, he looked around, wondering where he could be, the place looked
so strange and so different from his room at home. Then he
remembered,--he was far from home, in the little cabin of the "Mary
Ellen." It was a cosy place, with all the little beds for the children
around the cabin. And these beds were not like the ones he usually
slept in. They were little shelves on the wall, two rows of them, one
row above the other. It was funny, he thought, to sleep on a shelf,
but that was what the thirteen children had to do. He was lying on a
shelf himself just then, wrapped in a blanket.

The Round Fat Rosy Woman was bending over the stove. It was a jolly
little stove, round and fat and rosy like herself, and it poked its