to be sure not to touch any of his fruit or flowers.  She loved her father and her mother; she loved Olly with all her whole heart, though he was a tease, she loved her nurse, whom she and Olly called Nana, and who had been with them ever since Milly was born; and she loved Fraeulein, and was always begging flowers from her mother that she might take them to school for Fraeulein’s table.  So you see Milly was made up of loving.  And she was a thoughtful little girl too, tidy with her dress, quick and quiet at her lessons, and always ready to sit still with her fairy-book or her doll, when mother was busy or tired.  But there were two things in which Milly was not at all sensible in spite of her sensible face.  She was much too ready to cry when any little thing went wrong, and she was dreadfully afraid of creatures of all sorts.  She was afraid of her father’s big dog, she was afraid of the dear brown cow that lived in the field beyond the garden, she was afraid of earwigs.  I am even ashamed to say she was afraid of spiders.  Once she ran away as if a lion were behind her from a white kitten that pulled her dress with its frolicsome paws to make her play with it; but that, Milly would tell you, was “when I was little,” and she was quite sure she was a good deal braver now.

Now what am I to tell you about Olly?

Olly was just a round ball of fun and mischief.  He had brown hair, brown eyes, a brown face, and brown hands.  He was always touching and meddling with everything, indoors and out, to see what was inside it, or what it was made of.  He liked teasing Milly, he liked his walks, he liked his sleep in the morning, he liked his dinner, he liked his tea, he liked everything in the world, except learning to read, and that he hated.  He could only do one thing besides mischief.  He could sing all kinds of tunes—­quick tunes, slow tunes, and merry tunes.  He had been able to sing tunes ever since he was quite a tiny baby, and his father and mother often talked together of how, in about a year, he should be taught to play on the piano, or perhaps on the violin, if he liked it better.  You might hear his sharp, shrill little voice, singing about the house and the garden all day long.  John the gardener called it “squealin’,” and told Olly his songs were “capital good” for frightening away the birds.

Now, perhaps, you know a little more about Milly and Olly than you did when I began to tell you about them, and it is time you should hear of what happened to them on that wonderful journey of theirs up to the mountains.

First of all came the packing up.  Milly could not make up her mind about her dolls; she had three—­Rose, Mattie, and Katie—­but Rose’s frocks were very dirty, Mattie had a leg broken, and Katie’s paint had been all washed off one wet night, when Olly left her out on the lawn.  Now which of these was the tidiest and most respectable doll to take out on a visit?  Milly did not know how to settle it.