“Well now, honey, I suah is sorry to heah dat!” said the colored man.  “Your toy Lamb down de coal hole!  Dat is too bad!”

“Can we get her out?” asked Arnold.  “I’ll crawl down the hole and get the Lamb if you won’t throw any more coal.”

“Oh, I won’t frow any mo’ coal—­not fo’ a while—­not when I knows whut de trouble is,” said the kind-hearted driver.  “But I doan believe, mah li’l man, dat you’d better go down de coal hole.”

At that moment the door of Dorothy’s house opened, and her mother came out on the porch.

“What is it, Mirabell?” she asked.  “What has happened?” She saw the children from next door talking to the coal driver, and she wondered at it.

“Oh, my Lamb is down the coal hole!” said Mirabell.

“Oh, that’s too bad!” exclaimed Dorothy’s mother.  “I saw you holding a toy Lamb up to the window, before Dorothy was taken ill.  How did your toy get down the coal hole?”

Mirabell and Arnold told by turns, and the driver said: 

“I suah is sorry, lady.  But it w’an’t mahfaulta-tall!”

“I know it wasn’t,” said Dorothy’s mother.  “But do you think you could get the little girl’s Lamb’s back?”

“Well, dat coal hole isn’t so very big,” was the answer, as the driver scratched his kinky head.  “But I might squeeze mahse’f down in it.”

“Oh, I think a better way would be to go down in our cellar, crawl over the bin, and get the Lamb that way,” Dorothy’s mother said.

“Yes-sum, I could do it dat way!” the colored man said.  “I’se been down in yo’ cellar befo’.  I’ll get de Lamb on Wheels.”

Dorothy’s mother waited on the front porch, and Mirabell and Arnold waited on the sidewalk near the coal hole.  A little while after the colored man had gone in the side entrance, through the cellar and into the coal bin, the two children heard him calling, as if from the ground beneath them.

“I got de Lamb!” said the driver, in a voice that sounded far-off and rumbly.  “Watch out, now!  I’se gwine to frow it up de hole!”

“All right!” said Arnold.  “I’ll catch her!”

“No, don’t throw my Lamb!” objected Mirabell.  “She might fall on the sidewalk and break.”

“All right—­den I’ll hand her up out ob de hole,” called the colored man, who was now in the partly filled bin under the sidewalk.  “Watch out fo’ her!”

Mirabell and Arnold could hear him walking around on the coal under the sidewalk.  In another half minute a black hand was thrust up through the hole, and in the hand was a white, woolly Lamb on Wheels.  Wait a minute!  Did I say white?  Well, I meant to have said a black Lamb.

For Mirabell’s white, clean Lamb on Wheels was now covered with black coal dust.

“Oh, that isn’t my Lamb on Wheels at all!” cried Mirabell, and there were real tears in her eyes as her brother took the coal-dust covered toy from the colored man’s hand.  “That isn’t my Lamb at all!”