"You're not going to have the croup!" declared his twin. "You never had it! But I have had the croup, and I didn't catch it the way William did." "No-o," admitted Laddie. "But--but I'm catching a new riddle if you'd only wait a minute for me to get it straight." "Pooh!" said Vi. "Who cares anything about your old riddle? Br-r-r! it's cold in this room. Maybe we'll all get the croup if we can't have a better fire." "It isn't the croup you mean, Vi," put in Rose again, but without stopping to explain to her smaller sister where and how she was wrong about William's illness. "Say, Russ, why don't the steampipes hum any more?" broke in the voice of Margy, the next to the very littlest Bunker, who was playing with that latter very important person at one of the great windows overlooking the street. Russ chuckled. He had just put the very last crooked piece of the puzzle into place. "You don't expect to see humming birds in winter, do you, Margy?" he asked. "Just the same, winter is the time for steampipes to hum," said Rose, shivering a little. "Oh! See! It's beginning to snow!" "So 'tis," cried Russ, who was the oldest of the six. "Supposing it should be a blizzard, Rose Bunker?" "S'posing it should!" repeated his sister, quite as much excited as Russ was at such a prospect. "Buzzards fly and eat dead things. We saw 'em in Texas at Cowboy Jack's," announced Laddie, forgetting his riddle-making for the moment. "That is right, Laddie," agreed Rose kindly. "But we're not talking about buzzards, but about blizzards. Blizzards are big snowstorms--bigger than you ever remember, I guess." "Oh!" said Laddie doubtfully. "Were we talking about--about blizzards?" "No, we weren't!" exclaimed Vi, almost stamping her foot. "We were talking about William's croup----" "He hasn't got the croup, I tell you, Vi," Rose said wearily. "He has. Aunt Jo----" "In the first place," interrupted Rose quite decidedly, "only children have croup. It isn't a grown-up disease." This announcement silenced even Violet for the moment. She stared at her older sister, round-eyed. "Do--do diseases have to grow up, too?" she finally gasped. "Oh, dear me, Vi Bunker!" exclaimed Rose, "I wish you didn't ask so many questions." "Why not?" promptly inquired the smaller girl. "We-ell, it's so hard to answer them," Rose frankly admitted. "Diseases don't grow up, I guess, but folks grow up and leave diseases like croup, and measles, and chicken-pox, behind them." "And cut fingers and bumps?" asked Laddie, who had almost forgotten the riddle about William's croup that he was striving to make. But Vi did not forget the croup. One could trust Vi never to forget anything about which she once set out to gather information. "But how did William catch the croup through a broken window in the neu-ral-gi-a?" she demanded. "When I had croup I got my feet wet first." "He hasn't got the croup!" Rose cried again, while Russ began to laugh heartily.