Cheaper by the Dozen

with all the freckles? Oh, mercy! Don't hang up, please. Are you still there? Thank goodness! Please don't hang up."
    Then, holding the telephone so that the boy on the otherend could still hear him, Frank would shout desperately: "Martha, come quick. Imagine! It's a boy calling for you. Isn't that wonderful? Hurry up. He might hang up."
    "Give me that phone, you little snake-in-the-grass," Martha would scream in a white rage. "When I get through I'll tear your eyes out, you unspeakable little brat, you." And then, in a honeyed voice, into the mouthpiece. "Helloooo. Who? Well, good looking, where have you been all my life? You have? Well, I've been waiting too. Uh, huh."
    One of Ernestine's admirers was shy and subdued, and never could bring himself to tell her what he thought of her. After he had been calling on her for almost a year, he finally mustered his courage and had a beautiful picture taken of himself. Then he inscribed across the bottom of the picture, in purple ink, a very special message.
    The message said, "All My Fondest Thoughts Are of You, Dearest Ernestine."
    He couldn't bring himself to give the picture to her personally, so he wrapped it up, insured it for one hundred dollars, and sent it through the mail.
    Ern kept it hidden in a bureau drawer, but no hiding place in our house was any too safe, and the junior-high-school contingent finally discovered it, memorized it, put it to music, and learned a three-part harmony for it.
    The next time the bashful boy came to call, Frank, Bill and Lill, hidden in a closet under the front steps, started to sing:
    "All my fondest thoughts,
    "(My fondest thoughts)
    "Are of you,
    "(Yes, nobody else but you)
    "My Dearest Ernestine,
    "(I don't mean Anne; I don't mean Mart)
    "But Dearest Ernestine."
    The shrinking sheik turned a bright crimson and actually cringed against the hatrack, while Ernestine picked up one of Dad's walking sticks and started after the younger set, bent on premeditated, cold-blooded mayhem.
    As a matter of routine, Frank and Bill would answer the front door when a sheik came to call and subject him to a preliminary going over, designed to make him feel ill at ease for the balance of the evening.
    "Look at the suit," Frank would say, opening the coat and examining the inside label. "I thought so. Larkey's Boys Store. Calling all lads to Larkey's College-cut clothes, with two pairs of trousers, for only seventeen fifty. This fellow's a real sport, all right."
    "Pipe the snakey socks," Bill would say, lifting up the sheik's pant leg. "Green socks and a blue tie. And yellow shoes."
    "You kids cut it out or I'll knock you into the middle of next week," the sheik would protest hopelessly. "Have a heart, will you? Beat it now, and tell your sister I'm here." Frank brought out a folding ruler that he had slipped into his pocket a few minutes before, and measured the cuffs of the visitor's pants.
    "Twenty-three inches," Frank told Bill. "That's collegiate, all right, but it's two inches less collegiate than the cuffs of Anne's sheik. Let's see that tie..."
    "Let's see his underwear," Bill suggested.
    "Hey, stop that," the sheik protested. "Get your hands off of me. Go tell your sister that I'm here, now, or there's going to be trouble."
    One of Ernestine's sheiks drove a motorcycle madly around town, and used to buzz our place three or four times a night in hopes of catching sight of her. Mother and Dad didn't allow the boys to come calling on school nights, but there was always a chance Ernestine might be out in the yard or standing by a window.
    One night he parked his motorcycle a couple of blocks away, crept up to the house, and climbed a cherry tree near Ernestine's bedroom window. Fortunately for the motorcyclist, Dad was out of town on business.
    Ernestine was doing her homework, and had a spooky feeling she was being watched through the open window. It suddenly occurred to her that she hadn't heard the motorcycle go chugging by the house for several hours, and she immediately grew suspicious.
    She walked into a dark room, peeked out from behind a shade, and saw the sheik high up in the cherry tree silhouetted against the moon. She was furious.
    "The sneaking peeping tom," she told Anne. "Good golly, I was just about to get undressed. There's no telling what he might have seen, if I hadn't had that creepy feeling I was being watched."
    "The sight probably would have toppled him right out of the tree," Anne said a little sarcastically. "Do you