After the street door had banged to, she finished cutting up the aubergines, lined the baking dish thickly with the slices, added a layer of mince-meat, another of aubergines, broke two eggs over them, bread-crumbed them and carried them off to the oven in the next street, so quickly and so deftly that even her mistress, had she been there to watch her, could not have called her "lazy one." After that she carved Bebeko's promised boat from a large aubergine which she had kept back, and sharpened a bit of firewood for the mast. VI It was nearly four that afternoon before she got up to the baker's shop, and her uncle had already gone round to the coffee-house. Her aunt was in the courtyard, sorting out wood for the night's baking, from a load which had been brought down from the hills the day before. Mattina set to work to help her, and her aunt told her that her uncle had said he was to be sent for as soon as she arrived, because he meant to take them both out to see something, ... "something," she added mysteriously, "that your eyes have never seen!" And then she went off to send the boy to call her husband. When Kyra Demetroula returned after a few minutes' absence, it was to find Mattina, who had come across a little sprig of thyme among the firewood, holding it tightly between her hands, close to her face, and smelling it with long indrawn breaths, the tears trickling down her cheeks. Her aunt stared at her dumfounded. She had always been of the town. "Are you mad, my child?" she exclaimed, throwing up her arms. "To be spoiling your heart over a bit of old herb! Give it to me! Let me throw it into the oven! What will your uncle say when he comes? He will think I have been giving you stick! Look at your eyes!" "Never mind! Let me keep it! Oh, let me keep it! I beg of you to let me keep it, my aunt! Oh, it is so beautiful! It ... it ... brings back Poros to me," and Mattina gulped down her sobs and dried her eyes on the back of her sleeve. "Hush, now, I hear your uncle." He came in laughing, dressed in his Sunday best. "Health to you, Mattina! You have been forgetting us for so long! And if you only knew where we are going! If you only but knew!" And it is true they went to a wonderful place. In a broad street, up and down which the crowded street cars were constantly running, they stopped at an entrance where a man sat behind a tiny little window, and Mastro Anastasi paid some money to him. Then they passed into a great big dimly lighted room, with many seats all in a row placed from one end to another; and a great many people and children were sitting in them. Mattina sat between her aunt and her uncle, and waited. "Why do we sit here?" she asked at last, "and why is it dark?" Suddenly a little bell tinkled, and at one end of the hall it became light; and then all sorts of extraordinary things passed before Mattina's eyes.