As soon as they passed through the hedge they found themselves in a picturesque broken country, rather difficult to traverse, but very prettily decorated with rocks, streams, and waterfalls.  Little groves of cedars, the exact size and shape of Christmas-trees, grew out of the rocks; the candles were already full-grown, but Schlorge sent the Japanese doll running back to tell Sara that she must not light them, as they would not be ripe till Christmas Eve.  Sara had never seen a prettier place, but she was rather worried by a maternal anxiety about the dolls.  For it was certainly not a very safe place for them.  Of course the Brown Teddy-Bear and the Billiken were all right, though the latter might come to grief if he should fall on his head.  The Japanese doll, who had lost a hand, was unbreakable; but unbreakable only means that you may be dropped from a reasonable height upon hard-wood floors, but not from a second-story window on concrete or asphalt.  That was how the Japanese doll had lost his hand (it would have been his head, but for the fact that the accident happened while he was indisposed from neuralgia, and had his head pinned up in the Baby’s flannel petticoat).  And these rocks certainly looked as hard as any pavement.  And even as Sara worried, the worst happened:  she heard a dreadful cracking sound, followed by a shrill clamor from the dolls and a hoarse cry from Schlorge, and the grim, excited voice of the Snimmy’s wife.  It was by no means a pleasant sound, like the cracking of breaking rules:  no, it was the familiar, heart-rending sound that makes the heart of any mother of dolls turn cold.  Sara went leaping and scrambling down the rocks, with the Plynck and the Teacup hovering anxiously over her.  In a few moments she reached the scene of the accident, and found them all gathered around the Kewpie, who lay in the lap of the Snimmy’s wife with both legs broken.  Sara ran and knelt beside her.

“Now, here, don’t you go and burst into tears,” said Schlorge, speaking in the gruff tone an anxious doctor uses toward an excitable patient.  “I’ll have my hands full mending your baby here, without having to mend you.  He has no internal injuries,” he added, turning the Kewpie upside down and peering down the stumps of his legs (which were hollow) into a perfectly pink and smooth and healthy-looking interior, “and you might have.  Besides, we’ll fix it up all right.”

“Can you really, Schlorge?” asked Sara.  There were tears in her voice, but, by trying very hard, she did keep from bursting into them.

“Of course I can!” said Schlorge, speaking quite crossly to conceal his sympathy.  “Here—­you Gunki!  A stretcher!”

So the Gunki came running with a stretcher made out of a large mullein-leaf, and they put the Kewpie and his legs tenderly upon it.  He was a trifle pale, but still smiling, and insisted that he did not suffer at all.

“Only it’s inconvenient, you know, not to be able to walk,” he explained, “and I didn’t want to miss the fun.  Would it be too much trouble—­could you take me this way?  These gentlemen, now—­”