"Be careful, my Patty," her father wrote to her, "you do not send me letters as regularly as you used to, and what you tell me sometimes sounds as if you thought it no harm to break a promise or to fail to keep an engagement you have made. You know I want you to _learn_ by your experiences, and imitate only the best qualities of those about you. I'm not going to have my house run on any Hurly-Burly plan, Miss Pattikins, so if you expect to secure the position of housekeeper, you must be prepared to keep things right up to the mark. We will have an exact proportion of methodical regularity, without having so much of it that it will be a bugbear. Oh, I tell you, my lady, our home is going to be a veritable Paradise on earth, and I am impatient to get it started. You have only one more visit to make, and then I will come and kidnap my own daughter and carry her off with me for a Christmas present." "What a dear, wise father I've got," mused Patty, after reading this letter, "and how he understands everything, even without my telling him. I _will_ try not to grow heedless and rattle-pated, though it's hard to be any other way in this house." One morning in August, Mrs. Barlow said to her husband, "Ted, you know the Carletons are coming this afternoon to stay several days, and I want you to go over to the three o'clock train to meet them. Don't forget it, will you? And you'll have to engage a stage to bring them over, for there'll be Mr. and Mrs. Carleton and four children, and perhaps a nurse. I don't know where we're going to put them all to sleep, but we must stow them away somehow. Patty, would you mind giving up your room for a time?" "Not a bit, Aunt Grace. Put me wherever you like." "That's a good girl. Well, suppose you sleep with Bumble. She has only a three-quarter bed, but if you don't quarrel you won't fall out." "All right," said Patty. "I'll move my things at once." "Very well, my dear; then we can give your room to Mr. and Mrs. Carleton, and Gertrude will have to room with Nan, and the other children must go up in the third story; no,--Harry can sleep with Bob. I declare I didn't think it would crowd us so, when I invited the whole family. But it will be only for a week, and we'll get along somehow." "Many hands make light work," and with much flurrying and scurrying the rooms were made ready for the expected guests. About noon the expressman came, bringing two trunks. "'Coming events cast their shadows before,'" said Uncle Ted; "here come the wardrobes of the Carleton family." "They must have sent them by express yesterday," said Aunt Grace; "dear me, how forehanded some people are. I wish I had been born that way. But when I go anywhere I take my trunk with me, and then I always leave it behind."