No sooner said than done.  Off rolled Flyaway, but alighted on her feet.

“O, my shole,” cried she, scrambling in again; “I fell down backboards.  O, ho!”

Such good nature was not to be resisted.  Sleepy Dotty waked up and smiled in spite of herself; and next minute her persecutor was skipping down stairs.

“Glad she’s gone.  Now I’ll put on my pretty morning dress; Aunt ’Ria hung it up in the closet.  I’m going to be a little lady all the time I’m out West, and not jump off of things and tear my clothes.”

Then Dotty’s mind strayed to a very different subject.

“It is so queer God is in this country just the same as He is in the State of Maine!  I said my prayers to Him before I started, and there He was and heard; and now He’s here and hears too; I don’t see how.  You can’t think without He sees your thoughts.”

Dotty, brushing her hair, looked in the glass so intently that she did not observe her Aunt Maria, who had quietly entered the room.  Mrs. Clifford was a wise woman, but she could not look into her niece’s heart.  She thought Dotty was admiring her own beauty in the mirror, whereas the child was not thinking of it at all.

What Mr. Beecher once said of little folks is very true:—­

“Ah, well, there is a world of things in children’s minds that grown-up people do not understand, though they too once were young.”

Mrs. Clifford went up to Dotty and kissed her.  Then the little girl was startled from her musings, and passing down stairs with her hand in Mrs. Clifford’s, thought she should be perfectly happy if dear Prudy were only on the other side of her.

Everything she saw that was new or strange she had to stop and admire, thinking it was an article that could only belong out West.

“O, auntie, what is this queer little thing with doors?”

“Grace’s cabinet, dear.”

“Her cabijen,” exclaimed Flyaway, darting in from the next room.

“Good morning, Dotty Dimple,” said Horace:  “did my Guinea pig wake you?  I lost him out.  What a noise he made!  I wish he was in Guinea, where he came from.”

Dotty had never seen a Guinea pig.  It was another curiosity, which promised to be more remarkable than Phebe or Katinka.  She began to think coming West was like having one long play-day.  Even the dining-room was a novelty, with the swinging fan suspended over the table to keep off flies.

“I have been wondering,” said Mrs. Clifford, as she urned the coffee, “how we shall amuse our little Dotty while she is here.”

“Fishing,” suggested Horace.

“Nutting,” said Grace.

“Prudy went to a wedding when she was in Indiana,” remarked Dotty, in a low voice.

“We will try to get up a wedding then,” said Horace; “but they are a little out of fashion now.”

“We have been thinking,” observed Mrs. Clifford, “of a nutting excursion for to-day.  How would you like it, Edward?”