Who was this Shelley who was always being quoted, and where did he come into the family saga? Byron, too, and others he hadn't heard mentioned in Boston. The appearance of Aunt Jerusha see-sawing round the corner was a welcome diversion, and soon the glittering knocker was screwed firmly into place. It was a triumph. Aunt Valeria was called down to see, and admitted it was resplendent! "Isn't it _delicious_ having our very own Maryland knocker on the door again!" remarked the young gentleman, with as heartfelt satisfaction as though he had watched the decline and fall of the old house in the South, and now saw the family fortunes to be mending. His grandmother patted his shoulder. "We say 'delicious' of good things to eat, not of door-knockers, even when they come from Maryland." "Oh, you wouldn't limit such a word as delicious to things we eat," remonstrated Aunt Valeria. "That's a point where I've always differed from Byron." "Then I'm surprised to hear it, for it's one of the few things he got right." The younger woman withdrew into her shell, making no rejoinder, but pausing at the bottom of the stairs on her way back to her work, with an air of perfunctory deference, to hear her mother out. Ethan watched the two with interest, feeling that he and his aunt were in the same boat. "We can't be too jealous of guarding the purity and honesty of language," Mrs. Gano said, firmly. "Any one who has the smallest pretence to caring for letters or for accuracy, or for _truth_, must do what he can to oppose the debasing of the current coin of speech. If you use words loosely, you'll begin to think loosely, and in the end you'll find you've lost your sense of values, and one word means no more than another. You'll be like Ethan here, who tells me 'bonny clabber' is perfectly splendid, and that he 'loves' Jerusha's Johnny-cake. After that, he mustn't say he loves you and me. It would be like kissing us after the cat." "It's a _kitten_," said Ethan, feeling froward and very bold. His grandmother laughed delightedly. "Oh, very well, we'll be accurate, if it's only about a kitten that I haven't so much as seen." The child flashed out to the veranda and returned with a small basket, in which lay a diminutive coal-black object. "You said you didn't like animals," he observed, reproachfully. "I don't--not in the house." "This one's very little to stay out o' doors." "Yes, it's too little to stay here at all." "Oh no, it isn't so little as that." He pulled out its tail that it might look as long as possible, but it would curl under. He lifted the creature up, clawing and feebly wailing. "Why, Ethan," said Aunt Valeria over the banisters, "it hasn't got its eyes open." "Not just _yet_." "Can it walk?" "Well, not much," said Ethan, guardedly; "but nobody walks as young as this. The Otways' cat brought it over in her mouth. They're nice to the Otways' cat _in the kitchen_." There was judgment delivered in the phrase.