"You can thank your stars, you unco guid lassie," he said within himself, his sarcastic eyes on Sissy's holy face, "that you've not a more religious and more conventional man for a father. 'T is one like that would yank you out of your play-acting preaching, or my name's not Madigan--ahem!" He did not know that the exclamation had been uttered aloud. Their father was unaware of the habit; but his daughters knew well that stentorian clearing of the throat which served for a warning that he was about to speak, and also a notification that he had spoken and would permit no difference of opinion. In the midst of her religio-dramatic ecstasy, Sissy heard that sound behind her, and jumped to her feet as though brought painfully back to a sorrowing, sinful world. "And he tooked her," said Frances later, in relating the affair to an eager audience of Madigans, "and he whipped her awful!" "With his whole hand?" asked Bep, feeling it to be the partizan's duty to doubt. "Uh-huh!" The small fabricator nodded her head in slow and awful confirmation. "That shows, Frank Madigan!" said Bep, scornfully turning her back. "He never whips with more than two fingers." And yet it was the confident belief of the Madigans that if it had been anybody but Sissy, that somebody would have been eaten alive! * * * * * It was Split who next adopted the Last Straw. Under her tutelage Frank learned to climb her sister's body and stand upright and fearless on her shoulders. She was also initiated into the great game of "fats," which the Madigans played winter evenings on the crumb-cloth in the dining-room; said crumb-cloth being printed in large squares of red and white, one of which was chalked off for the ring. Frank's induction into the game led to a grand battle between Split and Sissy, the latter contending that the baby's fingers could not properly handle and shoot the marbles. But Sissy ought to have known better than to make such a point, as the Madigans had a peculiar way of playing fats, for which Frank--being a Madigan--was as fitted by nature as any of her seniors.