"Oh, mother, you do it, you do it!" cried they.
Flora giggled audibly.
"You'll just spoil them children," said her mother, severely; "you ought to be ashamed of yourself, Flora." Flora tried to draw her face into gravity.

"Go right upstairs, children," said she.

"It's so funny, I can't help it," she whispered, with another furtive giggle.
"I don't see anything very funny in children's actin' the way they have all dinner-time." The children thumped merrily over the stairs.

It was clear that they stood in no great fear of their mother's chastisement.

They knew by experience that her hand was very soft, and the force of its fall tempered by mirth and tender considerateness; their grandmother's fleshless and muscular old palm was another matter.
Soon after Flora followed them there was a series of arduous cries, apparently maintained more from a childish sense of the fitness of things than from any actual stress of pain.