376 FLUT TER-D UCK.
aration of it, for after school hours the little girl sat patiently stitching till late at night, by way of apprenticeship to her future, buoyed up by her earnings, and adding strip to strip, with the hair going all the same way, till she had made a great black snake. Of course she did not get anything near three-halfpence for twelve yards, like the real " hands," but whatever she earnt went towards her Festival frocks, which she would have got in any case. Not knowing this, she was happy to deserve the pretty dresses she loved, and was least impatient of her mother's chatter when Flutter- Duck dinned into her ears how pretty she looked in them. Alas ! it is to be feared Lewis was right, that Flutter- Duck was a rattle-brain indeed. And the years which brought Flutter-Duck prosperity, which emancipated her from personal participation in the sewing, and gave Rachel the little bedroom to herself, did not bring wisdom. When Flutter-Duck's felicity culminated in a maid-servant (if only one who slept out), she was like a child with a monkey-on-a-stick. She gave the servant orders merely to see her arms and legs moving. She also lay late in bed to enjoy the spectacle of the factotum making the nine o'clock coffee it had been for so many years her own duty to pre- pare for the " hands." How sweetly the waft of chicory came to her nostrils ! At first her husband remonstrated.
"It is not beautiful," he said. "You ought to get up before the ' hands ' come."
Flutter-Duck flushed resentfully. " If I bin a missis, I bin a missis," she said with dignity. It became one of her formulae. When the servant developed insolence, as under Flutter-Duck's fostering familiarity she did, Flutter-Duck would resume her dignity with a jerk.
" If I bin a missis," she would say, tossing her flighty head haughtily, " I bin a missis."
