CHAPTER IV


Is Friday an unlucky day? You could not get Mrs. O'Callaghan to think
so, for it was upon the Friday that closed a week of anxious thinking
that Mrs. Brady called at the shanty. Neither could you get Mrs. Brady
to think so, for--but let us begin a little farther back. Hired girls,
as they were called in Wennott, were extremely scarce. Mrs. Brady was
without one--could not get one, though she had advertised long and
patiently. Now she was tired to exhaustion. Sitting in the old wooden
rocker that had been Mr. O'Callaghan's, Mrs. Brady rested a few moments
closely surrounded on all sides by the O'Callaghan furniture.

"'Tis a bit snug, ma'am," Mrs. O'Callaghan had said when piloting her to
this seat, "but it's my belafe my b'ys don't moind the snugness of it so
much as they would if they was girls."

Mrs. Brady mechanically agreed.

The four walls of the kitchen were rather too close together to inclose
a bed, a wash-bench, two tubs, a cooking stove, a table, seven Windsor
chairs, the water pail, the cupboard, and the rocking-chair in which
Mrs. Brady sat, and leave anything but a tortuous path for locomotion.
The boys knew the track, however, and seldom ran up against anything
with sufficient force to disturb it or their own serenity. But there was
not a speck of dust anywhere, as Mrs. Brady noticed.