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Were the little ones inside crowding about too recklessly, so that there was danger of one falling out? Had Eve and Petro come upon an especially good mud-puddle and built a bit more just for the fun of it? It was not very many days after this that Eve and Petro and all their comrades ceased coming to the cliff where their curious nests were fastened.
Some times he refreshes himself in the trough of a town-pump, without caring what the people think about him. Often, while carefully picking my way along the street after a heavy shower, I have been scandalized to see Monsieur du Miroir, in full dress, paddling from one mud-puddle to another, and plunging into the filthy depths of each.
Lucy stooped all of a sudden and picked up a dead fish. "Ugh! I never caught a fish before!" But next moment she threw it away in disgust. "How did dead fishes ever get into this mud-puddle?" queried Edith. "Well, they used to live in it before it dried up," replied Nate. "Fact is, this is a lake!" Everybody exclaimed in surprise; and Kyzie said:
Now Phelim had been a wonderful animal at home, and in his own mud-puddle, but it was quite another thing at Donnybrook. There he was eclipsed by pigs of a more choice breed, fatter, cleaner, and better behaved. Teddy was sadly disappointed and mortified he had supposed that there would be a tremendous competition for that jewel of a pig.
If I had not caught my foot in the reins that time I got out of the buggy in front of her house if I had not fallen in the water and had my clothes shrink in drying nor choked almost to death nor got under the counter nor failed to "speak my piece" nor sat down in that mud-puddle nor committed suicide nor run away from home nor performed any other of the thousand-and-one absurd feats into which my constitutional embarrassment was everlastingly urging me, I declare boldly, "Belle might have been mine."
She was conscious of an absurd thankfulness and relief that she had no well. "And there ain't no pond round here big enough to drown a baby kitten, except that little mud-puddle up at Fisher's, and they've dragged every inch of that. I see 'em." All this time Edwin Shaw had been teetering on uncertain toes on the borders of the crowd.
Two of them were Molly and Tim Doyle, the third a little girl whom Maida did not know. For a time she watched them, fascinated. But, presently, the school children crowding into the shop took all her attention. After the bell rang and the neighborhood had become quiet again, she resumed her watch of the mud-puddle fun.
Marsden, I came right down to earth and was Martha Cary in a minute. I'd been Mary all day, and, like a splash in a mud-puddle, she made me Martha; and I heard myself say: "No, Mrs. Pryor, we know you don't approve. You never yet have let a child here forget she was a Charity child, and only people who make others happy will approve." Then I walked away as quiet as a Nun's daughter.
They are now turbid; but the hue does not suggest the idea of a running mud-puddle, as the water of the Tiber does. No streams, however, are so beautiful in the quality of their waters as the clear, brown rivers of New England.
On the hot summer days, when the saloon-keeper on the farther side of the street pulled up his awning, the sun came over the housetops and looked down for an hour or two into the alley. It shone upon broken flags, a mud-puddle by the hydrant where the children went splashing with dirty, bare feet, and upon unnumbered ash barrels.
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