"The girl has got something for us," said Laura. "I told her about it. Oh, just a pick-up lunch--coffee, chops. I thought we wouldn't bother to-day. We'll have to eat in the kitchen." "Well, let's be about it," declared Landry, "and finish with these curtains afterward. Inwardly I'm a ravening wolf." It was past one o'clock by the time that luncheon, "picked up" though it was, was over. By then everybody was very tired. Aunt Wess' exclaimed that she could not stand another minute, and retired to her room. Page, indefatigable, declaring they never would get settled if they let things dawdle along, set to work unpacking her trunk and putting her clothes away. Her fox terrier, whom the family, for obscure reasons, called the Pig, arrived in the middle of the afternoon in a crate, and shivering with the chill of the house, was tied up behind the kitchen range, where, for all the heat, he still trembled and shuddered at long intervals, his head down, his eyes rolled up, bewildered and discountenanced by so much confusion and so many new faces. Outside the weather continued lamentable. The rain beat down steadily upon the heaps of snow on the grass-plats by the curbstones, melting it, dirtying it, and reducing it to viscid slush. The sky was lead grey; the trees, bare and black as though built of iron and wire, dripped incessantly. The sparrows, huddling under the house-eaves or in interstices of the mouldings, chirped feebly from time to time, sitting disconsolate, their feathers puffed out till their bodies assumed globular shapes. Delivery wagons trundled up and down the street at intervals, the horses and drivers housed in oil-skins. The neighborhood was quiet. There was no sound of voices in the streets. But occasionally, from far away in the direction of the river or the Lake Front, came the faint sounds of steamer and tug whistles. The sidewalks in either direction were deserted. Only a solitary policeman, his star pinned to the outside of his dripping rubber coat, his helmet shedding rivulets, stood on the corner absorbed in the contemplation of the brown torrent of the gutter plunging into a sewer vent. Landry and Laura were in the library at the rear of the house, a small room, two sides of which were occupied with book-cases. They were busy putting the books in place. Laura stood half-way up the step-ladder taking volume after volume from Landry as he passed them to her. "Do you wipe them carefully, Landry?" she asked. He held a strip of cloth torn from an old sheet in his hand, and rubbed the dust from each book before he handed it to her. "Yes, yes; very carefully," he assured her. "Say," he added, "where are all your modern novels? You've got Scott and Dickens and Thackeray, of course, and Eliot--yes, and here's Hawthorne and Poe. But I haven't struck anything later than Oliver Wendell Holmes."