Mrs. Ivy, holding her skirts very high and picking her way gingerly around the frozen puddles, was the first to reach him. “Ah! Here's our good little friend Rick, or Dick, is it? And this is the sweet little baby sister that God sent you.” “Naw it ain't,” said Skeeter; “that there's a boy, an' it ain't no kin to him. Its paw's in the pen, an' its maw's up fer ninety days, an' its jes' boardin' at his house.” “The case that was reported for the Home,” said Mrs. Ivy, turning with a significant nod to her companion who had just come up. At the word “home” Chick shuddered. It was the most terrible word in the English language to him. “What's the matter with your thumb, old fellow?” Miss Lady asked, seeing his frightened look. “Come here, Skeeter, and tell me what he says.” She relieved Chick of the young person whose parents were not in a position to minister to his wants, and sat on the door-step between the two boys, listening with flattering attention to a detailed description of each hero's wounds and scars and how they had been received. Mrs. Ivy, meanwhile, a veritable spider in the midst of a web of institutions, was warily planning to ensnare every helpless, poverty-stricken fly that came her way. To her, the web was not made for the fly, but the fly for the web; supplying flies was her chief occupation. Standing just inside the kitchen door with her skirts still gathered carefully about her, she viewed her surroundings with mournful sympathy. “The fact are,” Phineas was saying as he held his coat together at the collar, in a pretended effort to conceal his lack of a shirt, “that we ain't been prosperin' since you was last here. Looks like the hand of the Lord--” “Ah, Mr. Flathers,” remonstrated Mrs. Ivy, with a finger on her lip, “never forget that whom He loveth He chasteneth.” “I don't, Mrs. Ivy, I don't. I keep that in mind. If it wasn't fer that, Mrs. Ivy, I declare I don't know what I would do. Now you comin' to-day was a answer to prayer! I just ast that some way would be pervided 'fore the rent man come back at six o'clock. I didn't say in my prayer _what_ way, I just said _a_ way, that _a_ way would be pervided. And when I seen you and the young lady turnin' in the alley, I sez to Maria, 'never try to shake my faith no more, the clouds has been lifted!'” Mrs. Ivy, who was much more given to dispensing morals than money, shifted her position. “Mr. Flathers,” she said, looking at him with what she conceived to be a searching glance, “do you ever drink?” Assuring himself that Chick had gotten the can quite out of sight, Phineas looked at her reproachfully: “Me? Why, Mrs. Ivy, I thought everybody knowed that since I joined the Church--of course I ain't denying that there _was_ a time when I knowed the taste of liquor. There ain't no good denying that, and, besides confession is good fer me, it humbles my spirit, Mrs. Ivy, it keeps me from being a publican.”