"M-m. No, ma'am. Perhaps she doesn't know herself if it's right or not--when she calls me quaint. I _ain't quaint_! Oh, my! isn't that funny? You only have to leave off that funny 'q' letter and it makes 'quaint' 'ain't.' 'Quaint' ain't right; and 'ain't' ain't right--" "Oh, dear me, Carolyn!" cried her mother, stopping both ears. "You clatter just like a mill wheel. _Do_ stop." "Anyway," murmured the little girl, subsiding, "I don't like Miss Solomons as I did Miss Minnie Lester, who taught the red schoolhouse at the Corners." Carolyn was never through talking about the Corners and Sunrise Cove, where Uncle Joe Stagg lived and had his hardware store, and all her friends thereabout, as well as the adventures which had befallen her while her father and mother were away. Yet she had plenty of friends about her Harlem home--as odd, perhaps, and as curious a collection as she had found in the country where she had spent the greater part of a year. The sunny heart of Carolyn May appealed to almost everybody whom she met. There was Dominick, the "ice, wood and coal" man in the corner cellar. She had been fain to call him at first (she was only a _very_ little girl then, so she often said) the Nicewoodencoalman--all run together just like that! "And he _is_ a 'nice' man as well as an 'ice' man," she declared. "He has a nice wife, too, and a nice '_bambino_.' That's a baby. It is Italian. I expect I'll learn all the Italian there is pretty soon if I talk much with Dominick. "We've a little girl at our school, Maria Maretta, who is an Italian I'm quite sure. Only she won't talk it for us. She says it's 'wop talk' and she is an American. But Dominick talks Italian all the time. He says: 'I sella da coal, sella da wood, sella da ice, an' maka da mon'--maka nottings.' That is Italian. It is funny talk. It sounds almost like a kind of English!" The butcher's clerk--whoever he might be--was always a friend of Carolyn, for she had daily and serious discussions with him about Prince's scraps. Carolyn "marketed" for her dog with the same care that her mother selected provisions for their table. Otto, the butcher's boy, was teaching her German. She could already say "_wie geht es_." "The child will be a linguist," observed Papa Cameron in his joking way. Mrs. Dorgan, the "scrub lady," who always spoke in a hoarse whisper and was very devout if her calling upon the saints was any criterion, was likewise well up on Carolyn's list of friends. Mrs. Dorgan was a very mysterious woman, the little girl thought, for while she worked she told Carolyn out of the corner of her mouth endless tales of her relatives and how badly they treated her, and of her son Jimmy in the Canadian army who was bound to be sent home before long by his general because he had killed so many "av thim Germans that there won't be none lift for the other byes to kill, at all at all, if they don't stop the gossoon!"