“What is it, Ardelia, what is it?” they cried lifting up their skirts in sympathy, “a snake?” Mrs. Slater rushed out, seized Ardelia, half rigid with fear, and carried her to the porch. They elicited from her as she sat with her feet tucked under her and one hand convulsively clutching Mrs. Slater’s apron that something had rustled by her “down at the bottom,” that it was slippery, that she had stepped on it, and wanted to go home. “Toad,” explained Mrs. Slater briefly. “Only a little hop-toad, Delia, that wouldn’t harm a baby, let alone a big girl nine years old, like you.” But Ardelia, chattering with nervousness, wept for her shoes, and sat high and dry in a rocking-chair for the rest of the morning. “She’s a queer child,” Mrs. Slater confided to the young ladies. “Not a drop of anything will she drink but cold tea. It don’t seem reasonable to give it to her all day, and I won’t do it, so she has to wait till meals. She makes a face if I say milk, and the water tastes slippery, she says, and salty-like. She won’t touch it. I tell her its good well water, but she just shakes her head. She’s stubborn’s a bronze mule, that child. Just mopes around. ’S morning she asked me when did the parades go by. I told her there wa’n’t any but the circus, an’ that had been already. I tried to cheer her up, sort of, with that Fresh Air picnic of yours to-morrow, Miss Forsythe, and s’she, ‘Oh, the Dago picnic,’ s’she, ‘will they have Tony’s band?’ “She don’t seem to take any int’rest in th’ farm, like those Fresh Air children, either. I showed her the hens an’ the eggs, an’ she said it was a lie about the hens layin’ ’em. ‘What d’you take me for?’ s’she. The idea! Then Henry milked the cow, to show her—she wouldn’t believe that, either—and with the milk streamin’ down before her, what do you s’pose she said? ‘You put it in!’ s’she. I never should ’a’ believed that, Miss Forsythe, if I hadn’t heard it.” “Oh, she’ll get over it,” said Miss Forsythe easily, “just wait a few days. Good-by, Ardelia, eat a good supper.”