CHAPTER III.
GOES TO A TEA-PARTY.
The Widow Jones got her stockings the next day.

As I left them at the door she stuck her head out of an upper window and said to me that "the sewing society met at her house on Thursday afternoon, and the men-folks was coming to tea and to spend the evening, and I must be _sure_ an' come, or the girls would be _so_ disappointed," and she urged and urged until I had to promise her I would attend her sociable.
Drat all tea-parties! say I.I was never comfortable at one in my life.

If you'd give me my choice between going to a tea-party and picking potato-bugs off the vines all alone on a hot summer day, I shouldn't hesitate a moment between the two.

I should choose the bugs; and I can't say I fancy potato-bugs, either.
On Wednesday I nearly killed an old lady, putting up tartar-emetic for cream-tartar.

If she'd eaten another biscuit made with it she'd have died and I'd have been responsible--and father was really vexed and said I might be a light-house keeper as quick as I pleased; but by that time I felt as if I couldn't keep a light-house without Belle Marigold to help me, and so I promised to be more careful, and kept on clerking.
The thermometer stood at eighty degrees in the shade when I left the store at five o'clock Thursday afternoon to go to that infallible tea-party.