Hamlet, of course, was the star performer, but then he was more like a professional appearing at amateur theatricals. This day he was extremely contrary, however, and his mistress had to give him two or three scoldings in rapid French, which sounded very mysterious to the others. But when it came to the dancing he threw himself into the spirit of it at once, and waltzed to Miss Letty’s whistling until she grew tired. Next he did his greatest feat, a sort of sailor’s hornpipe, in which he was obliged to stand erect and keep in motion, while he jerked his body forward continually as if he was pulling in rope. This dance came to an abrupt ending because the tune which accompanied it struck Jack Waddles’s musical sensibilities, and caused him to bay in comic imitation of his father, thereby setting the others off in various keys, and causing such pandemonium that the Lanes’ groom rushed from the shrubbery, thinking “the scrimmage” had come. Under cover of the noise Pinkie slipped into the house at a signal from Miss Letty to tell the waitress that it was high time to make the “real tea” and carry the eatables to the pantry on the stone wall behind the arbour. Then she remembered that she had forgotten to ask her mother for a basket for Hamlet’s waiter trick. “It’s too bad,” she muttered to herself behind the pantry door. “Miss Letty says it’s his queerest trick, and now it’s all spoiled.” As she looked up, the crack of the door gave her a glimpse into the dining room, and her eye rested upon the mahogany sideboard at the exact spot where, safe and high and out of reach, rested a pair of openwork silver cake baskets with hoop handles that had belonged to her great-grandmother, and were consequently much treasured by the family. “The very thing,” she said, dropping her voice unconsciously to a whisper, “and a silver basket is lots properer than a straw one for a tea-party.” It was evident that at this moment Pinkie’s guardian angel and her conscience had taken a walk together to the farthest end of the garden. She pushed one of the big arm-chairs toward the sideboard, climbed from the seat to the back, secured the nearest of the precious baskets, flew to the pantry, emptied a box of five-o’clock teas into it, and covering the whole with a napkin, ran and placed it on the fence with the cakes and sandwiches, then sauntered back to her friends with a suspicious air of unconcern. “It is of no use for _us_ to have our tea until the dogs are served,” said Mistress Dorothy, picking her words, and speaking in manner and tone in perfect imitation of the way that some one of her elders might have said, “give the children their supper, and then we shall have ours in peace.”