"
"What an idiot!" said Euphemia, laughing in spite of her vexation.
"No, we aint no id-i-otses
What we want's a bot-ty mik."
So I sang as I walked to the kitchen door, and sent Jonas to the
barn for the bottle.
Pomona was in spasms of laughter in the kitchen, and Euphemia was
trying her best not to laugh at all.
"Who's going to take care of it, I'd like to know?" she said, as
soon as she could get herself into a state of severe inquiry.
"Some-times me, and some-times Jonas,"
I sang, still walking up and down the room with a long, slow step,
swinging the baby from side to side, very much as if it were grass-
seed in a sieve, and I were sowing it over the carpet.
When the bottle came, I took it, and began to feed little Pat.
Perhaps the presence of a critical and interested audience
embarrassed us, for Jonas and Pomona were at the door, with
streaming eyes, while Euphemia stood with her handkerchief to the
lower part of her face, or it may have been that I did not
understand the management of bottles, but, at any rate, I could not
make the thing work, and the disappointed little Pat began to cry,
just as the whole of our audience burst into a wild roar of
laughter.
"Here! Give me that child!" cried Euphemia, forcibly taking Pat
and the bottle from me. "You'll make it swallow the whole affair,
and I'm sure its mouth's big enough."
"You really don't think," she said, when we were alone, and little
Pat, with his upturned blue eyes serenely surveying the features of
the good lady who knew how to feed him, was placidly pulling away
at his india-rubber tube, "that I will consent to your keeping such
a creature as this in the house? Why, he's a regular little Paddy!
If you kept him he'd grow up into a hod-carrier.
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