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But Jane refused to get it, and finished her breakfast from a jar of candied ginger that some one had sent her, and read "Lorna Doone." Now and then a sound of terrific hammering would follow the steampipes and Jane would smile wickedly.
Russ chuckled. He had just put the very last crooked piece of the puzzle into place. "You don't expect to see humming birds in winter, do you, Margy?" he asked. "Just the same, winter is the time for steampipes to hum," said Rose, shivering a little. "Oh! See! It's beginning to snow!" "So 'tis," cried Russ, who was the oldest of the six. "Supposing it should be a blizzard, Rose Bunker?"
Whether the steampipes hummed or not, the children found that it was quite balmy on the boat. Although a strong breeze almost always blew, it was a warm one. They had long since entered into the Gulf Stream and the warm current seemed to warm the air more and more as the Kammerboy sailed southward.
"It isn't the croup you mean, Vi," put in Rose again, but without stopping to explain to her smaller sister where and how she was wrong about William's illness. "Say, Russ, why don't the steampipes hum any more?" broke in the voice of Margy, the next to the very littlest Bunker, who was playing with that latter very important person at one of the great windows overlooking the street.
The pink silk coverlet and the elegance of the silver coated steampipes at Beulah's; the implacable British stuffiness at the Winchester which had had its own stolid charm for the lineal descendant of the Pilgrim fathers; the impressively casual atmosphere over which the "hired butler" presided distributing after-dinner gold spoons, these impressions all dwindled and diminished and took their insignificant place in the background of the romance she was living and breathing in Peter's jewel box of an apartment on Thirtieth Street.
"I am not fond of your New England winters, Jo. I hope we shall go South " "Oh, Mother!" cried Rose excitedly. "Shall we really go down South with Daddy? Won't that be glorious?" "I guess it's warm down there," said Laddie. "Or maybe the steampipes hum." "Do the steampipes hum down South?" asked Violet.
He shouted in the face of the driving snow: "Come in here, snowman. Come in here!" "I ain't no snowman," drawled the colored boy. "But I sure is as cold as a snowman could possibly be." "It's warmer inside here than it is out there," Margy said. "Although we're not any too warm. Our steampipes don't hum. But you come in." "Yes," said Mun Bun, grabbing at the colored boy's cold, wet hand.
By that time the steampipes were humming and the whole house was warm and cozy again. "And we can thank Sam for that, Charles," said Mother Bunker. "William is ill, and you would have had to go down and fight that furnace if this boy had not come along and proved himself so handy." "Maybe we'd all better go down and thank him," said Rose soberly. Daddy Bunker laughed.
They saw the engines working, and peered down into the stoke hole which was very hot and where the firemen worked in their undershirts and trousers and a great clanging of shovels and furnace doors was going on. "I guess the steampipes always hum on this boat," remarked Laddie. "It is not like it was at Aunt Jo's before that Sam boy came to make the furnace go."
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