“What ails ye?” asked his mother, looking at him curiously; “are ye not feeling well the morning, maybe now?”
“He’s thinking along of Annie Maria Doyle,” impudently explained younger brother Tim, ten years old.
“Tiger” reached over the hand of a champion and swept the small McQuirk from his chair.
“I feel fine,” said he, “beyond a touch of the I-don’t-know-what-you-call-its. I feel like there was going to be earthquakes or music or a trifle of chills—and fever or maybe a picnic. I don’t know how I feel. I feel like knocking the face off a policeman, or else maybe like playing Coney Island straight across the board from pop-corn to the elephant houdahs.”
“It’s the spring in yer bones,” said Mrs. McQuirk. “It’s the sap risin’. Time was when I couldn’t keep me feet still nor me head cool when the earthworms began to crawl out in the dew of the mornin’. ’Tis a bit of tea will do ye good, made from pipsissewa and gentian bark at the druggist’s.”
“Back up!” said Mr. McQuirk, impatiently. “There’s no spring in sight. There’s snow yet on the shed in Donovan’s backyard. And yesterday they puts open cars on the Sixth Avenue lines, and the janitors have quit ordering coal. And that means six weeks more of winter, by all the signs that be.”
[150]
