“Yes, if orderin’ will make it taste better, and it seems to affect some folks’ vittles that way.”

So Charlie and Aunt Stanshy “played saloon.”  He wrote his order on a slip of paper, and left it on the table for her inspection while he went up stairs.  Directing her spectacles toward it, she read, with some amazement, this request: 

“Please bring me for dinner, a pickle Aunt Stanshy, would be what you know nice to toast.”

“Toasted pickle!” exclaimed Aunt Stanshy, in alarm.

Charlie had now returned to the sitting-room.

“You don’t mean, Charles Pitt, a toasted pickle!”

“Why, no; ha! ha!  There are two things on that paper.  I said, ’Please bring me for dinner, Aunt Stanshy, what you know to toast.’  That is on one side, and on the other, ‘A pickle would be nice,’ and I see now that you could read the words straight across, and it would mean what you say; ha! ha!  I don’t expect a pickle, of course, for I am sick, you know.”

“O!”

She did not laugh.  She was rather mortified to think she had not read the order aright.  The noblest natures have their infirmities.  Afterward, being ashamed of herself because she did not take pleasantly this unintended joke, she manifested her penitence by getting up an extra dinner for Charlie.  There was more toast, and even of a finer quality.  There was another orange, and there was some jelly that Aunt Stanshy took the pains to buy at Miss Persnips’s store.  This was a sweet but thin-voiced little woman, who sold a variety of things in a store on the corner of the lane and Water Street.

“It is nice to be sick, Aunt Stanshy.”

“Do you think so?”

“Yes, just a grain sick.”

It was so pleasant to be in the warm, comfortable sitting-room and watch the dreary weather out in the lane.  The back side of the house butted on the lane, no fence intervening.  Aunt Stanshy had no objection to such a close contact, but rather liked it, declaring it to be “social.”  She did not favor, though, the sociability that drunken sailors manifested several times when going from the saloons on Water Street down to their vessels at the wharf in which the lane ended.  They would stagger against the house, pushing one another and bombarding it.  Aunt Stanshy was on hand, though.  A pail of freshly-drawn water, Arctic cold, and from an upper window, administered freely to the offenders, had been known to produce a healthy effect.  Aunt Stanshy’s remedies for various troubles might be vigorous, but they were generally effective.  There was not much passing in the lane, that stormy day.  A fisherman, in an oil-skin suit, went by, trundling a wheel-barrow of fish to a store in town.  At noon, somebody else appeared.

“There’s Mr. Walton,” said Aunt Stanshy.

“And there’s Tony with him,” said Charlie.

“Where’s his father?”

“Tony says he is in Europe.”