appeared at the same angle—­failed to restore symmetry.  Until one dreadful morning, after an imprudent bath, the whole upper structure disappeared, leaving two hideous iron prongs standing erect from the spinal column.  Even an imaginative child like Mary could not accept this sort of thing as a head.  Later in the day Jack Roper, the blacksmith at the “Crossing,” was concerned at the plaintive appearance before his forge of a little girl clad in a bright-blue pinafore of the same color as her eyes, carrying her monstrous offspring in her arms.  Jack recognized her and instantly divined the situation.  “You haven’t,” he suggested kindly, “got another head at home—­suthin’ left over,” Mary shook her head sadly; even her prolific maternity was not equal to the creation of children in detail.  “Nor anythin’ like a head?” he persisted sympathetically.  Mary’s loving eyes filled with tears.  “No, nuffen!” “You couldn’t,” he continued thoughtfully, “use her the other side up?—­we might get a fine pair o’ legs outer them irons,” he added, touching the two prongs with artistic suggestion.  “Now look here”—­he was about to tilt the doll over when a small cry of feminine distress and a swift movement of a matronly little arm arrested the evident indiscretion.  “I see,” he said gravely.  “Well, you come here tomorrow, and we’ll fix up suthin’ to work her.”  Jack was thoughtful the rest of the day, more than usually impatient with certain stubborn mules to be shod, and even knocked off work an hour earlier to walk to Big Bend and a rival shop.  But the next morning when the trustful and anxious mother appeared at the forge she uttered a scream of delight.  Jack had neatly joined a hollow iron globe, taken from the newel post of some old iron staircase railing, to the two prongs, and covered it with a coat of red fireproof paint.  It was true that its complexion was rather high, that it was inclined to be top-heavy, and that in the long run the other dolls suffered considerably by enforced association with this unyielding and implacable head and shoulders, but this did not diminish Mary’s joy over her restored first-born.  Even its utter absence of features was no defect in a family where features were as evanescent as in hers, and the most ordinary student of evolution could see that the “Amplach” ninepins were in legitimate succession to the globular-headed “Misery.”  For a time I think that Mary even preferred her to the others.  Howbeit it was a pretty sight to see her on a summer afternoon sitting upon a wayside stump, her other children dutifully ranged around her, and the hard, unfeeling head of Misery pressed deep down into her loving little heart as she swayed from side to side, crooning her plaintive lullaby.  Small wonder that the bees took up the song and droned a slumberous accompaniment, or that high above her head the enormous pines, stirred through their depths by the soft Sierran air—­or Heaven knows what—­let slip flickering lights and shadows to play over that cast-iron face, until the child, looking down upon it with the quick, transforming power of love, thought that it smiled.