But Florence coaxed and threatened and bribed, and when Francis Madigan got home that night to dinner, he found his big porch covered with children gathered from blocks around. Each held in his or her hand one pin or more--the price of admission to the show. (Fom was a most thrifty and businesslike Madigan.) And the show, which he as well as they saw in the interval between the opening of his front door and its swift closing, was Frances's plump, naked body draped in a sheet, posing, with uplifted arms and an uncertain, apprehensive smile, on a tottering draped pedestal, which fell with a crash when Fom, who was crouched behind steadying it, beheld her father's face. "And he tooked her," with bated breath Frank repeated the monotonous refrain of her saga, "and he made her thwow evewy--pin--she'd made--out the fwont window!" * * * * * As a Madigan, Frances should have been above fear. She was--except of the tank in the back room up-stairs. Its gurglings and chucklings were more than mortal four-years-old could bear at night in the dark, particularly after Bep had taught her to be superstitious. Bep's nature was spongy with a capacity for saturation. She took in every new child fad and folly. She believed in a multiplicity of remedies, and was ready to try a new one--on somebody else--whenever the occasion offered. When Frank got the whooping-cough, and used to march around the dining-room table, stamping in her paroxysms of coughing and of speechless anger at the Madigans who followed mimicking her, Bep decided that she would try the latest cure she had heard of. So she wandered down to the gas-works one day, Frank's hand in hers, to give her patient the benefit of breathing the heavily charged atmosphere down there. "How-do, Mrs. Grayson?" she greeted the gas-man's wife amiably, as she opened the kitchen door. Mrs. Grayson, her babies leaving her side to cluster interestedly around Frank, replied that she and the children were well; that the epidemic of whooping-cough had not reached them because they lived so far out of town. "Yes," assented Bep, politely; "and then, the smell of gas is so good for whooping-cough. That keeps 'em well. And that's why I brought Frank down here." Mrs. Grayson's excitable motherhood took alarm. "I never heard," she said quickly, "that breathing in coal-tar smells kept off whooping-cough." "No, neither did I, though p'r'aps it does. But it cures--I know that." "You don't mean to say--" Mrs. Grayson flew like a terrified hen for her chicks, lifting two by an arm each clear from the ground and hustling the third into the kitchen before her. "Yep, she's got it," said Bep, proudly. And Frank, feeling called upon to be interesting, burst into a convulsive corroboration of the glad tidings. "You nasty little minx!" exclaimed Mrs. Grayson, as she shut the door in Bep's face. "What's 'minx'?" Frank asked her sister, as they toiled up toward town again.