curb.

The other boys backed away, leaving Arlo Junior to fight his own battle—or run, if that seemed to him the part of wisdom, as evidently it had.

"I hope that will teach you to bring cats into our kitchen, Arlo
Junior!" Janice cried after him.

"No, 'twon't," declared the boy, rubbing the ear that had received the greater number of her blows. "I knew how to do it before, didn't I? My, Janice Day! but you can slam a fella."

"I wish I could hurt you more," declared the girl. "You've made me enough trouble."

She marched on, leaving the scattered crowd of urchins to gather again about Arlo Junior, but now in a scoffing rather than in an admiring crowd. The bubble of Arlo Junior's conceit had been punctured. He had been whipped by a girl!

"Now," thought Janice, as she went along home, "I would not want Daddy to know I did that. Fighting a boy on the street! I guess Miss Peckham, who is always peering through her blinds at what I do, if she had seen me would be sure to say I was misbehaving because I had no mother to make me mind. As though I wouldn't behave just as well for Daddy as I used to for dear mother!

"Only I haven't really behaved very well to-day," she went on, reviewing the matter to herself. "I don't care! Yes, I do too! No matter what Arlo Weeks, Junior, did, I oughtn't to have fought him on the street like that. Oh, dear!" mused the girl, "I don't know whether I am sorry I hit Arlo Junior or am sorry that I'm not sorry. It's awfully confusing."

She choked back a sob, dashed the tears from her eyes, and suddenly saw that the hazy object she had been looking at for the past minute was really a human figure squatting on the side porch steps of the Day's cottage.

"Why! who can that be?" thought Janice Day, staring with all her might at the odd-looking creature perched thus on the steps, with a bulging old-fashioned black oilcloth bag beside her.

It was a woman in a cheap, homemade calico dress, and with rows upon rows of flounces on the skirt. She sat on the next-to-the-top step of the porch while her shoes were planted flat-footed on the walk. She was very short-waisted, while her limbs, accentuated by the model of the flounced skirt seemed enormously long.

Indeed, she looked like the halves of two people mysteriously glued together. Her nether limbs without doubt belonged to a giantess; her body although broad and sturdy, was almost dwarflike. Her arms were very short.

Above this strange figure was a fat, baby-like face, with staring, light-blue eyes and whisps of straw-colored hair laid flat to her, head under a close fitting hat.

"It's another one," groaned Janice, her heart sinking. "I know she must be from the intelligence office, because—well—she looks so unintelligent, I guess!"

Janice opened the gate and approached the ungainly woman doubtfully. Surely daddy could not have seen her before hiring this very peculiar-looking person. He must have accepted her services over the telephone, and "sight, unseen."

The newly hired girl wreathed her flabby face in a vacuous smile. She bobbed up from her seat, bringing the oilcloth bag with her, and towering over Janice Day in a most startling manner.

"How-de-do! I guess you are after bein' Mr. Day's little girl, heh?"

The voice from the giantess made Janice jump. It was high and squealing, like a bat's voice; and some people's ears are not attuned to the bat's cry and cannot hear it at all.

"Ye-es. I am Janice Day," admitted the girl.

"Well," squealed the newcomer, "I'm the lady your paw sent up to do the work. You're a right pretty little girl, ain't you?"

Janice ignored this bit of flattery as she mounted the steps and drew forth the door key.

"What is your name, please?" she asked the woman.

"Why, I'll tell you," said the other in a most confidential tone, blundering up the steps after Janice and stooping to get her lips near the girl's ear. "My real name is Mrs. Bridget Burns; but my friends all call me Delia. I don't like 'Bridget.' Would you mind callin' me Delia, or else Mrs. Burns, heh?"

"I think father would prefer to call you by your first name," Janice said, trying not to show her surprise and amusement. "We will call you Delia if that pleases you."

"You're a real nice little girl, I can see that," said Delia, with a huge sigh of satisfaction, following Janice, bag and all, into the house.

Janice led the way up the back stairs to the girl's room. It was just as Olga had left it—as untidy and "mussed up" as ever a room was.

Delia uttered a high, nasal ejaculation. "I guess your last girl wasn't very clean," she said. "Who was she?"

"She was a Swede," Janice replied wearily.

"Heh! Them Swedes!" sniffed Delia, voicing a pronounced national prejudice.

"She left in a hurry," Janice explained. "She—she got mad. One of the neighbor's boys played a trick on her and she left."

"Ye don't be tellin' me? Couldn't she spank the boy? Sure, 'tis no sinse them foreigners has."

"I hope you will not take offense so easily," Janice rejoined. "Here is clean linen for your bed. We send the flat work to the laundry. There is a broom and carpet sweeper in the storeroom, and plenty of dust cloths. You would better put your own room in order first. Then you can come down and I will show you about getting dinner."

"Sure, you is very young to be so knowin' about housework. Is your mother dead?"

"Yes."

"I didn't know but she'd gone off and left you and your

paw," observed this strange creature, "So many of them be's doin' that now."

"Oh!" gasped the girl.

"So that's why your paw did the hirin' through Murphy's Agency!
Well, I like to work where there's no lady boss," said Delia.
"You and me is goin' to get on fine."

Janice wondered if that were so. In no very enthusiastic frame of mind, she descended the stairs to put away her hat and coat and to place her books on the table in the living room.

CHAPTER IV. MORE TROUBLES THAN ONE

Janice dreaded to have this new houseworker look into that back kitchen and see its condition. What Olga had done with the soft coal ammunition was enough to make Delia depart before she had even taken up her new duties.

Yet Janice shrank from cleaning the room herself. She had a lot of home work to do for school, and she would have to show the new girl, too, just where everything was kept and what was expected of her.

Fortunately the dinner-getting would be a simple matter. There was a roast already prepared for the oven, potatoes and another vegetable, and a salad. The latter were in the house. Olga had been no dessert maker, but there were canned pears in the refrigerator and some baker's cake (Daddy called it "sweetened sawdust") in the cupboard.

The girl would have to be told about these things. Fortunately they had not begun to use the summer kitchen as yet. It was true that Olga had only the day before cleaned the place, as well as she knew how, in preparation for the approaching warm weather.

But to put things to rights in that room again, and to remove all traces of the bombardment of the cats, would take half a day or more. And Janice Day shrank from the use of the scrubbing brush and strong soda-water.

She decided that the