CHAPTER VIII.

WORKING FOR A LIVING.

IT

T need not be stated just how, nor exactly when, the boys entered jubilantly upon their respective businesses, and commenced earning their bread by the sweat of their brows.

It is sufficient to say that the first application of each was signally fortunate. They were all "taken in and done for," as Jacob expressed it, on short notice.

David was up at Cherry Farm, Jacob hob-nobbed with Bob Skittles, and Solomon tooted the fish-horn.

It is to be presumed that pity and an honest and hearty desire to help the Downs in their adversity prompted largely towards the employment of the trio; for their rolicking, frolicking tendencies were well known in the neighborhood.

But Farmer Yates, the owner of Cherry Farm, said in his bluff, blunt way, "We'll give 'em a chance, and see what'll come on't. There's no telling what a colt'll make till you've driven him in harness."

Mr. Skittles and Mr. Greene expressed the same idea, though not quite in the same words.

But while the boys had passed thus easily into the sunshine of success, Becky's dream of serving in the yarn factory had grown *less and less.

For Mrs. Down's eventful journey, with all its attendant sorrows and ills, had quite prostrated her. She was attacked with a low nervous fever, which reduced her to a skeleton, and weakened her to such an extent that she was not able to lift her head from her pillow.

This, of course, detained Becky at home. Nurse, night-watcher, housekeeper, cook, all these posts she was called upon to fill; and though she did not "work for her living," as the boys often boasted of doing, she

found that time did not hang heavily on her hands.

Her duties as nurse alone would have been quite sufficient, one would think, since her mother was as capricious as a child, and distractingly querulous and exacting.

The demands made upon her by her brothers, in the cooking line, were also difficult to meet. For though David crammed himself with fruit at the farm, and Jacob helped himself largely to pea-nuts and dried apples in company with Bob Skittles, and * Solomon indulged in private clam-bakes in Mr. Greene's back yard,- in spite of all these stomach props and linings, the boys trooped in at meal-times like ravening wolves. Hungry? You'd better believe so! Only the word is a hundred times too tame for the awful gnawing which kept seesawing up and down within them.

The manifold duties laid upon Becky did not bend nor break her. She really seemed to be made of sterner stuff than flesh and blood. The doctor marvelled, and the

neighbors who often dropped in to give Becky a "lift," or to sit a while with her mother, expressed their astonishment at seeing her “take hold of things so handy.”

Somehow the Downs were not expected to be "much." Not that they were considered black sheep, or anything of that kind, but they had always had the name of being so slack, and wasteful, and incapable. To be sure, Becky had never been quite fike the rest. Even as a baby, if you remember, she had always been an "Upside" Down, an odd one, an "original." But so far she had done nothing startling, unless it were to launch out of all family form and likeness, to shoot up like a bean-stalk, and to be bony and muscular, when by good rights she should have been fat and flabby.

Now, at last, she began to be called "smart." Indeed, for a young woman of twelve to be able to keep house and hospital together, as she did, - not that everything was done perfectly, was very remarkable.

How many of my readers, of the same gender and age, could have done it?

Miss Riggs, who during these times hopped in and out of Mrs. Down's, like an unusually spry ground-sparrow, chirped it round triumphantly that "Becky had more in the tip-end of her little finger than the rest had in their whole bodies," and that she had "always said so."

All this, however, must not blind us to the honors due to Cæsar, that is, the three boys, who at the end of the fifth week were still in love with "working for a living.”

At night, around the supper-table, they rehearsed, for each other's benefit and edification, the leading events of the day.

"I say," cried Jacob, with his mouth full, on one of these interesting occasions, “you never see such fun as there was down to our place this afternoon."

Solomon and David looked up inquiringly, which was all they could do, since each had the blade of his knife half way down his throat.