It's very funny to go around the house with your finger tied up in a bandage and two strips of wood—that is, it's funny the first day. By the second day it's queer and after that it's no fun at all; it's a bother.

Long before Mary Jane was allowed to use her hand again she had decided that never, never, NEVER would she poke her finger into anything. It takes only a second to poke a finger in but it takes a good long time to get a badly hurt finger well, she had learned that.

For the first three days Aunt Effie played with her all the day long and that wasn't so bad. They played dress up and school and Aunt Effie showed her how she had school when she was a little girl. And they made new dresses for all the dolls; and straightened the drawers of all the doll dressers and—well, they did every single thing that Mary Jane could think of or Aunt Effie could plan. And then, without a minute's warning a telegram came; a telegram which said that Aunt Effie must come home at once because her sister was sick.

And after that Mary Jane was lonesome, oh, so very lonesome and she couldn't think of half enough things to do to fill the days. For, you see, Mrs. Merrill had her duties and father had to go to his work and Alice had her school and Doris had the chicken pox so no one, much as they might have wished to, could spend every minute of the day with a little girl who was perfectly well except for a hurt finger. That little girl had to play by herself a part of the time.

Mary Jane was standing by her mother's dresser, a couple of mornings after Aunt Effie left, when the cleaning woman came into the room to give it its weekly cleaning.

"Why don't you help here, Mary Jane?" suggested Mrs. Merrill; "you could dust my dresser things with your well hand and lay each thing, as you dust it, on the bed. Then I'll shake the dresser cover and Amanda will put the dust sheet on the bed and everything will be ready for cleaning in a jiffy."

If there was one thing above another that Mary Jane loved to do, it was to handle the pretty things on her mother's dresser. Ordinarily she wasn't allowed to touch a thing there, so she quickly replied, "Yes, mother, I'd love to help," and then took the dusting cloth Mrs. Merrill handed her and set to work.

She dusted off the pin tray and the toilet water bottle and brushed the fringe of the lamp shade—she knew exactly what to do because she had watched her mother many times.

"There, now!" she said in a satisfied voice, "it's all ready for the cover cloth. Can you put it on, 'Manda?" Amanda Rice was the good cleaning woman who came every week to set the Merrill house in apple pie order; she and Mary Jane were fast friends.

"Jest a little minite, honey," replied Amanda, "soon as ever I gets this rain room clean."

Just off Mrs. Merrill's room was a tiny room which opened also into the bathroom and in this tiny room was a shower bath. Amanda insisted on calling it the rain room because the water came down from the ceiling like rain; and she always seemed to have a fear that something about that room would hurt her. She was most particular to clean that room before she did either the bathroom or Mrs. Merrill's room—she seemed to want the bad job out of the way.

Perhaps when Mary Jane asked her to hurry with the cover cloth, Amanda hurried a little too fast with her scouring of faucets or perhaps she was just careless. However it happened, she turned on the cold water and it poured over her from the ceiling in an ice cold shower.

"Heavens! Honey! Lor' a mercy! De water hit me!" she shouted and she ran, dripping and screaming out of the shower room, out of the bedroom and down the hall.

Mrs. Merrill came hurrying to see what the matter might be and Mary Jane jumped to turn off the water before it should splatter out on the bedroom floor. And then, while Mrs. Merrill was busy comforting Amanda and hunting some dry clothes for her, Mary Jane sat down on the bed room floor to think. How funny Amanda had looked with the water running all over her clothes! Mary Jane, who had been used to a shower bath from the time she was a tiny little girl, had never before realized how funny it seemed to other folks. "I expect Doris would think it was funny," she thought. "I wonder if she knows about it. And wouldn't Junior look—" but Mrs. Merrill bustled into the room just then and Mary Jane had no more time for thoughts.

Mrs. Merrill worked rapidly to make up for lost time. She shook the dresser scarf out of the window, brushed off the window-seat pillows and finished making the room ready for Amanda. "Now, dear," she said to Mary Jane when everything was finished, "Amanda is coming in here to sweep, why don't you go out and play a while with Junior? See? He's out in the yard. If you play nicely, you won't hurt your finger, I'm sure."

Mary Jane didn't care much about playing with Junior just then; she would far rather have stayed and help Amanda sweep. So she walked very slowly down the stairs and out of doors and was none too cordial in her greeting to Junior. But he didn't seem to mind and as it's very hard to keep on snubbing a person who doesn't notice he is being snubbed, Mary Jane soon gave it up and they began making mud pies. Nice goo-y mud pies out of the black mud in the to-be-geranium bed near the house.

But hardly had they finished their pies and arranged them on the edge of the porch to bake, before Junior's mother called him to come home.

"She's always calling you home," protested Mary Jane, "but I 'pose you'll have to go or you can't ever come over here again!"

"Yes," agreed Junior, "I'd better go home. But I'll come back again." And he started to wipe his muddy hands on his trousers.

"Oh, don't, Junior!" cried Mary Jane. "You know what your mother'll say! She don't like mud pies anyway. Come into the house and wash 'em before you go."

The two children skipped into the house and upstairs to the bathroom where
Mary Jane filled the bowl with warm water—then she thought of something.

"Do you like to walk out of doors in the rain?" she asked craftily.

"Yes," replied Junior in surprise, "only my mother won't let me."

"Don't you think she'd let you if it rained indoors?"

"I don't know, 'cause it don't," replied Junior decidedly.

"Yes, it does, it does at our house," said Mary Jane. "You stand inside this door, and I'll show you."

Junior seemed to have some objection to closets so it took coaxing to get him where Mary Jane wanted him. But when, on careful inspection, he found that this closet had two doors, quite unlike other closets he was acquainted with, and also that it looked very harmless, he stepped over the high sill and onto the tile floor. Quick as a flash Mary Jane reached up and turned on the water—and down came the deluge!

Water so cold that it took his breath away so he couldn't scream and then, in a minute, so hot that it burned him, descended from the spray in the ceiling and soaked him to the skin. Mary Jane sat on the door sill, in all the splatter, and laughed and laughed. Junior grabbed for the door and shook it trying to get out—just as Mrs. Merrill opened the door from her bedroom onto the sight. Junior darted passed her and ran down the stairs, dripping water and mud from his dirty hands on every step and screaming at the top of his voice all the way.

"What in the world—" began Mrs. Merrill.

"We was just talking about water from the sky in the house," explained Mary Jane innocently, "and Junior was surprised to see it come. I guess he thought water from the sky in the house would be dry," she added.

"And I," said Mrs. Merrill as she took off her dusting cap and reaching into the clothes closet for her coat, "will have to leave my work and go over and explain and apologize. Mary Jane, you sit right there on that chair till I come back and you can't have another little playmate over this week—not one!"

Mary Jane sat down on the big chair and started counting the boards in the floor. "One, two, three, six nine seven, ten," she said to herself patiently. "Then if nobody can come to see me, I guess I'll have to find somebody right in this house. I wonder—"

What did she wonder?—wait and see.