Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/77

 seemed to think you would like to be a help to us if you could."

I turned to greet the woman child, but she had strayed into the house. I heard her shouts from my bedroom. Then she came running to us, cooing in helpless joy.

"Candy—candy—Uncle Maje—lovely candy—all pink and dusty."

Well over a face set with the mother's eyes was spilled that which she had clutched and eaten of,—a thing pink and dusty, in truth, but which was not candy.

"She does those things constantly," said the dejected father. "I don't see what I can do to her."

I saw, however, and did it, first wiping the tooth-powder from her face. She had called me Uncle Maje.

"She's a regular baddix," announced my namesake, gravely judicial. Then, as if with intention to indicate delicately that the family afforded striking contrasts, he added, "I ain't a baddix—I can nearly sing."

The children fribbled about us while we talked away the afternoon. The woman child at last put me to thinking—to thinking that perhaps butterflies are not meant to be happily caught. With many shouts she had clumsily enough imprisoned one—a fairy thing of green and bronze—in a hand so plump that it seemed to have been quilted. A moment she held it, then set it free, perhaps for its