“I’m a second or third cousin,” was the answer.  “She is stuffed with sawdust, but I am stuffed with cotton.”

“Then I will call you Miss Cotton Doll,” went on the Monkey.  “What brought you here?  Were you so bad in school that you had to be shut up in a desk?”

“No, not exactly.  But a little girl named Mary brought me in her school bag yesterday, and she took me out in the study hour, and the teacher said it was wrong.  So she took me away from the little girl named Mary.”

“I thought Mary brought a lamb to school,” said the Monkey on a Stick, who, having lived in a toy store, of course knew all about toy books and Mother Goose verses.

“That was another Mary,” went on the Cotton Doll.  “Besides Mary didn’t bring the lamb to school, it followed her one day.”

“Oh, so it did—­I had forgotten,” went on the Monkey.

“But my Mary brought me to school,” said the Cotton Doll, “and her teacher took me away.  She put me in this desk drawer; the teacher did.”

“Well, now we’re here, let’s have some fun,” said the Monkey to the Cotton Doll after a bit.  “We are all alone by ourselves, and we can do as we please.  Let’s look around and play.  We can’t stand up, as the drawer isn’t high enough, but we can crawl on our knees.  Let’s see what else is here.”

“All right,” agreed the Cotton Doll.  So while the teacher was hearing the lessons of Herbert, Madeline and the other boys and girls, the Monkey (crawling off his stick for the time being) and the Cotton Doll went creeping on their hands and knees around the drawer.

“Let’s look in the bottle of ink,” proposed the Monkey, as he crawled near it, and began pulling at the cork.

“Oh, don’t do that!” cried the Cotton Doll, in a whisper, of course.  “Don’t open it!  You’ll get all black!”

“Oh, if it’s black ink, I know what we can do!” said the Monkey.  “We can black up like colored minstrels, and have a little show in here by ourselves.  I’ll black your face with the ink, and you can black mine, though I am pretty brown now.”

“But I don’t want my face blacked with ink!” cried the Cotton Doll, as the Monkey took the cork from the bottle.  “I don’t want to be a minstrel!”

“Oh, but you must!” insisted the Monkey, laughing, and, catching hold of the Cotton Doll in one hand, he tilted up the ink bottle in the other, and dipped in the end of his tail.

“Now I’ll paint you nice and black!” he laughed.

“Oh, don’t!  Please don’t!” begged the Cotton Doll, as she tried to get away from the Monkey.  But she couldn’t, for he held her tightly, and the inky end of the tail was coming nearer and nearer to her face.

CHAPTER III

THE JANITOR’S HOUSE

“There you are!  Oh, how funny you look!” chattered the Monkey on a Stick in a whisper to the Cotton Doll, as they were both shut up together in the teacher’s desk.  “You don’t know how funny you look!  If I only had a looking-glass I’d show you!”