"That's a likely story! You'd better not say so. I rather s'pose you will if I give it to you. Look here, Ellen, you'd better mind how you behave; you're going to do just what I tell you. I know how to manage you; if you make any fuss I shall just tickle you finely," said Nancy, as she prepared a bed of coals, and set the cup of gruel on it to get hot. "I'll do it in no time at all, my young lady — so you'd better mind." Poor Ellen involuntarily curled up her feet under the bed- clothes, so as to get them as far as possible out of harm's way. She judged the best thing was to keep quiet if she could, so she said nothing. Nancy was in great glee; with something of the same spirit of mischief that a cat shows when she has a captured mouse at the end of her paws. While the gruel was heating, she spun round the room in quest of amusement; and her sudden jerks and flings from one place and thing to another had so much of lawlessness, that Ellen was in perpetual terror as to what she might take it into her head to do next. "Where does that door lead to?" "I believe that one leads to the garret," said Ellen. "You _believe so?_ why don't you say it does, at once?" "I haven't been up to see." "You haven't! you expect me to believe that, I s'pose? I am not quite such a gull as you take me for. What's up there?" "I don't know, of course." "Of course! I declare I don't know what you are up to exactly; but if you won't tell me, I'll find out for myself pretty quick — that's one thing." She flung open the door and ran up; and Ellen heard her feet trampling overhead from one end of the house to the other; and sounds, too, of pushing and pulling things over the floor; it was plain Nancy was rummaging. "Well," said Ellen, as she turned uneasily upon her bed, "it's no affair of mine; I can't help it, whatever she does. But oh! wont Aunt Fortune be angry!" Nancy presently came down with her frock gathered up into a bag before her. "What do you think I have got here?" said she, "I s'pose you didn't know there was a basket of fine hickory-nuts up there in the corner? Was it you or Miss Fortune that hid them away so nicely? I s'pose she thought nobody would ever think of looking behind that great blue chest and under the feather- bed, but it takes me! — Miss Fortune was afraid of your stealing 'em, I guess, Ellen?" "She needn't have been," said Ellen, indignantly. "No, I s'pose you wouldn't take 'em if you saw 'em; you wouldn't eat 'em if they were cracked for you, would you?" She flung some on Ellen's bed as she spoke. Nancy had seated herself on the floor, and using for a hammer a piece of old iron she had brought down with her from the garret, she was cracking the nuts on the clean white hearth. "Indeed I wouldn't!" said Ellen, throwing them back; "and you oughtn't to crack them there, Nancy — you'll make a dreadful mess."