To bath
and beds, every one of you! Annie's had a lamp on the kitchen table this
half hour ready to light you up the stairs. My! My! My!--but there's a
busy day ahead. Roger! Well, of all ungrateful listeners! Roger!"
But in the end, the Doctor carried Roger up to bed, preceded by Annie
with the lamp. And while Annie was turning back quilts and smoothing
pillows and fumbling at windows, with the freedom of long service she
soundly berated the Doctor for postponing the bed-time hour with his
Christmas twaddle.
"And Mister Muggs there," she said severely, "has had one apple too
many, I'm thinkin', and the last one as big as his head. He'll need a
pill before morning. The child's packed himself that hard and round ye
fear to touch him." And then because Muggs was such a very little boy
Annie was minded to assist with his bath, and laid kindly hands upon an
indefinite outer garment which began immediately beneath his arm-pits
and ended at his shoe-tops in singular fringe.
"An', ma'am," she explained to Aunt Ellen a little later, "I had to let
him go in to his bath by himself. No more had I touched his
bushel-basket of rags--an' they were hitched over his shoulders with
school straps and somebody's shirtwaist underneath--than he let out a
terrific shriek (ye must have heard him) an' all the boys come runnin'
and crowdin' round him and starin' so frightened at me, an' his brother
yelled at him to keep quiet or something or somebody'd get him, and he
kept quiet that sudden I could fairly see the child swell.
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