They gathered around the sitting-room lamp, Sammy Pinkney having appeared. Mrs. MacCall joined them with her mending, as she loved to do in the evenings. And the Corner House study hour was inaugurated for the fall with appropriate ceremonies of baked apples on the stove and a heaping plate of popcorn in the middle of the table. "I can study so much better when I'm chewing something," Agnes admitted. Dot was soon nodding and Mrs. MacCall from her low rocking chair observed: "I think little folks had better go to bed with the chickens--eh, my lassie!" "No, Mrs. Mac; I don't want to," complained the sleepy Dot. "I've got a bed of my own." "I'll go with her," said Tess, knowing that her little sister did not like to retire alone, even if she might object to the company of chickens. Really, none of them studied much on this evening; but they had a happy time. All, possibly, save Sammy. The thought of going to school once again made that embryo pirate very despondent. "'Tain't that I wouldn't like to go with the fellers, and play at recess, and hear the organ play in the big hall, and spin tops on the basement play-room floor, and all _that_," grumbled Sammy. "But they do try to learn us such perfectly silly things." "What silly things?" demanded Agnes with amusement. "Why, all 'bout 'rithmetic. Huh! Can't a feller count on his fingers? What were they given us for, I'd like to know?" demanded this youthful philosopher. "Ow! ow!" murmured Neale, vastly amused. "Huh!" went on Sammy. "Last teacher I had--mine and Tessie's--was all the time learning us maxims, and what things meant; like _love_, and _charity_ and _happiness_. She was so silly, she was! "That Iky Goronofsky is the thick one," added Sammy, with a grin of recollection. "When she was trying to make us kids understand the difference between the meaning of those three words he couldn't get it into his head. So she gave him three buttons, one for love, one for charity and one for happiness, and made him take 'em home to study." "What did he do with them!" asked Neale, interested. "Why, when she asked Iky the next time about love, charity and happiness, he didn't know any more than he did before," said Sammy, with disgust. 'Where's your buttons, Iky?' she asks him, and Iky hauls out two of 'em. "'There's love, Miss Shipman, and there's charity,' says Iky, 'but my mother sewed happiness on my waist this morning.' Did you ever hear of such a dunce as that kid?" concluded Sammy, with disgust. Sunday was always a busy day, if a quiet one, at the old Corner House. Everything had been done to prepare for the expected guests; but several times Agnes had to enter the two big rooms which were to be devoted to the use of Cecile Shepard and her brother, just for the sake of making sure that all was right and ready.