And that is something we must find out.

CHAPTER VI

THE PEDDLER’S BASKET

Slowly down the street walked the organ grinder, turning the crank and making music.  His little girl, an Italian child, after putting the Candy Rabbit under her apron, looked around the house where Madeline lived to see if any one might be coming out with pennies.  But no one came.

Madeline and Dorothy and Mirabell were in the back yard where they had gone to play in the sand pile, after leaving the Sawdust Doll and the Candy Rabbit on the front veranda.  Madeline’s mother was not at home, and the cook was too busy in the kitchen to bother with giving pennies to organ grinders, though she might have done so if she had had time and had had plenty of pennies.

As for Madeline and Dorothy and Mirabell, they had given one look down the street when they heard the hand-organ music.  Then, as they saw he had no monkey with him, Madeline said: 

“Oh, a hand-organ isn’t any fun unless it has a monkey.  We don’t want to bother waiting to see this one.  Come on and play.”

So, as I have told you, they were in the back yard, leaving the Doll and the Rabbit on the veranda.  And then the hand-organ man’s little girl had come along and taken the Rabbit.

“I’ll take him home with me.  Nobody wants him,” she said to herself as she went down off the veranda with the candy chap under her apron.  And she really thought the Rabbit had been put out because no one wanted him.  She slipped the Bunny into a large pocket in the skirt of her dress and hurried on after her father, who had walked down the street grinding out his tunes.

The organ grinder’s little girl did not tell her father about the Candy Rabbit until that night when they reached their home after their day’s travel.

With the organ man lived his brother, who was a peddler.  He had a big basket in which he carried pins, needles, pin cushions, little looking glasses, court plaster and odds and ends, called “notions.”  This peddler man went about from house to house selling notions to such as wanted to buy them.

He, too, had been about all day, peddling with his basket, and he reached home about the same time as did his brother, the organ grinder, and the little girl.

The family had supper, and, after that, Rosa brought out the Candy Rabbit.  All the while the Bunny had been in her pocket, and the sweet chap did not like it very much.

“I want to be out where I can see things,” murmured the Rabbit.  “I want to see what is happening.  It is dreadful to be kidnapped like this and carried away from home!”

For that is what really had happened—­the Candy Rabbit had been kidnapped by Rosa, the organ girl, though, really, she did not mean to do wrong in taking him.

But when the Bunny was taken out of Rosa’s pocket and set on the supper table in the light, he looked around him.  It was quite a different home from Madeline’s—­not nearly so nice, the Candy Rabbit thought, but of course he dared say nothing.