Page:Zangwill-King of schnorrers.djvu/387

373 FLUTTER-DUCK. 373

Every morning Flutter- Duck, who felt very grateful to Heaven for this crowning boon, — at one time bitterly du- bious, — made the child say her prayers. Flutter- Duck said them word by word, and Rachel repeated them. They were in Hebrew, and neither Flutter- Duck nor Rachel had the least idea what they meant. For years these prayers preluded stormy scenes.

"Mediant/" Flutter-Duck would begin.

" Mediani!" little Rachel would lisp in her piping voice. It was two words, but Flutter-Duck imagined it was one. She gave the syllables in recitative, the dni just two notes higher than the medi i and she accented them quite wrongly. When Rachel first grew articulate, Flutter-Duck was so overjoyed to hear the little girl echoing her, that she would often turn to her husband with an exclamation of " Thou hearest, Lewis, love?"

And he, impatiently : " Nee, nee, I hear."

Flutter-Duck, thus recalled from the pleasures of mater- nity to its duties, would recommence the prayer. " Medi- am!

Which little Rachel would silently ignore.

" Mediani! ' Flutter- Duck's tone would now be impera- tive and ill-tempered.

Then little Rachel would turn to her father querulously. " She thayth it again, Mediani, father ! "

And Flutter-Duck, outraged by this childish insolence, would exclaim, "Thou hearest, Lewis, love?" and incon- tinently fall to clouting the child. And the father, annoyed by the shrill ululation consequent upon the clouting : " Nee, nee, I hear too much." Rachel's refusal to be coerced into giving devotional over-measure was not merely due to her sense of equity. Her appetite counted for more. Prayers were the avenue to breakfast, and to pamper her feather-