Allen's I saw them have spare ribs and cabbage, and a stuffed calf's heart."
It was at this psychological point that their grand-mother entered the room.
"What's all this how-de-do?" she inquired. "First, I meet Tom storming down the street like a tornado. Next I come in and see all of you acting as though you were lamenting the fall of Ilium. What ails you all?"
Their explanations were various.
"Pa got mad," was Sara's simple version.
"It's that I have to eat bum grub while Jamie swipes the nuts and raisins," Robert contributed, more fully.
"Well, it's a thing I have noticed," said their grand-mother, "that none of your children eat enough to keep a grasshopper alive, unless you force it down with a force pump. What ails children nowadays, I don't know. When I was little we ate what was set before us and were glad to do it; and nowadays it is, 'I don't like this' and 'I don't want that,' and you newfangled parents stand it."
"I'd like to know what you'd do," Alice inquired bitterly.
"Not what you're doing," her mother-in-law responded briskly, "not be lying down and making a doormat of myself, anyway. I tell you, Alice, there have always been two kinds of children in the world—and heaven knows which is the worse—the kind that will eat everything and the kind that won't eat anything. And the kind that eat everything, will eat; you can't stop them eating and they are never satisfied, though they ought to be. The kind that won't eat anything, nothing will make them eat—not in our day. But in the good old days both kinds ate a good plate of victuals set before them, and they ate it up and they ate it quick! And then both kinds went and hooked cookies out of the
