He accepted these tasks without protest, and
performed them conscientiously, save in the parrot difficulty, in
which case he gave one look at the lady, and fled without opening the
subject.
It could not be said that he appeared more cheerful, the sole sign of
any increased exhilaration of spirits being the occasional
straightening of his cravat and the smoothing of his hair--
refinements of toilet that had heretofore been much neglected, though
he always looked unmistakably the gentleman.
He seemed more attracted by Lisa than by any of the smaller children;
but that may have been because Mary had told him her story, thinking
that other people's stories were a useful sort of thing to tell
people who had possible stories of their own.
Lisa was now developing a curious and unexpected facility and talent
in the musical games. She played the tambourine, the triangle, the
drum, as nobody else could, and in accompanying the marches she
invented all sorts of unusual beats and accents. It grew to be the
natural thing to give her difficult parts in the little dramas of
child life: the cock that crowed in the morn to wake the sleeping
birds and babies, the mother-bird in the nest, the spreading willow-
tree in the pond where the frogs congregated,--these roles she
delighted in and played with all her soul.
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