Mrs. Slawson closed the gate after her with care. "I'll just step light," she said to herself, "an' steal in on 'em unbeknownst, an' give 'em as good a scare as ever they had in their lives--the whole lazy lot of 'em." But, like Mother Hubbard's cupboard, the kitchen was bare, and no soul was to be found in the laundry, the pantry or, in fact, anywhere throughout the basement region. Softly, and with some real misgiving now, Martha made her way upstairs. Here, for the first time, she distinguished the sound of a human voice breaking the early morning hush of the silent house. It was Radcliffe's voice issuing, evidently, from the dining-room, in which imposing apartment he chose to have his breakfast served in solitary grandeur every morning, what time the rest of his family still slept. Martha, pausing on her way up, peeped around the edge of the half-closed door, and then stopped short. Along the wall, ranged up in line, like soldiers facing their captain, or victims of a hold-up their captor, stood the household servants--portly Shaw the butler, Beatrice the parlor-maid, Eliza the "chef-cook"--all, down to the gay young sprig, aforesaid, who, as Martha had explained to her family in strong disapproval, "was engaged to do scullerywork, an' then didn't even know how to scull." Before them, in an attitude of command, not to say menace, stood Radcliffe, brandishing a carving-knife which, in his cruelly mischievous little hand, became a weapon full of dangerous possibilities. "Don't dare to budge, any one of you," he breathed masterfully to his cowed regiment. "Get back there, you Shaw! An', Beetrice, if you don't mind me, I'll carve your ear off. You better be afraid of me, all of you, an' mind what I say, or I'll take this dagger, an' dag the life out of you! You're all my servants--you're all my slaves! D'you hear me!" Evidently they did, and not one of them cared or dared to stir. For a second Radcliffe faced them in silence, before beginning to march Napoleonically back and forth, his savage young eye alert, his naughty hand brandishing the knife threateningly. A second, and then, suddenly, without warning, the scene changed, and Radcliffe was a squirming, wriggling little boy, shorn of his power, grasped firmly in a grip from which there was no chance of escape.