Mother Hamilton's Birthday
see if you can find any way to get strawberries from Bill Harmon's; it was to have been a bread-and-milk supper on the piazza, to-night, and it must be hurriedly changed into a Consular banquet! Verb. sap. Fly!"
Gilbert turned up a little before six o'clock and was introduced proudly by his mother as a son who had just "gone into business."
"I'm Bill Harmon's summer clerk and delivery boy," he explained. "It's great fun, and I get two dollars and a half a week."
Nancy and her mother worked like Trojans in the kitchen, for they agreed it was no time for economy, even if they had less to eat for a week to come.
"Mr. Hamilton is just as nice as I guessed he was, when his first letter came," said Nancy. "I went upstairs to get a card for the supper menu, and he was standing by your mantel-piece with his head bent over his arms. He had the little bunch of field flowers in his hand, and I know he had been smelling them, and looking at his mother's picture, and remembering things!"
What a merry supper it was, with a jug of black-eyed Susans in the centre of the table and a written bill of fare for Mr. Hamilton, "because he was a Consul," so Nancy said.
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