“Now for the last, the soft, fat, dark one. Somehow she reminds me of a comfortable coloured person. I know, we’ll call her Dinah, the very thing! and Di will do for short.” So the last pup was duly named and put down, and Anne proposed that they should rest their heads by wheeling up to the Hilltop Kennels to tell Miss Jule about the names, when Tommy, who was looking after the pups who had scampered away on being released, grasped Anne’s arm and pointed after them. Wonder of wonders! Phœbe was holding Bob by the hind leg, while fat Dinah played leap-frog over his back in a clumsy but perfectly serious manner, doing it not once but many times, and she was only three weeks old! * * * * * In the matter of training and education it makes a deal of difference to the mother as to whether her family consists of few or many, and Anne learned many new points in dog law during the next few weeks. Happy continued to feed and wash the sixlets until they were about two months old, but she did not play with them, as she had with Jack and Jill, except upon rare occasions, but left them to teach each other and learn by experience, while she took a nap, near by enough to hear if anything went wrong, wearing when awake the expression of being good-naturedly bored. It was Big Brother who threw bones in the air for them, and gave them their first taste of meat by bringing home a young woodchuck, and dragging it into their midst; when they sprang upon it with a fierceness that seemed almost to frighten gentle Jack, and a tug-of-war ensued in earnest, which ended in the woodchuck’s tail giving way and Dinah turning a back somersault, it was saucy Phœbe who dragged away the prize, and the others licked their lips with gusto. “Never mind,” said Miss Jule, “when it comes time for the hunting Happy will let no one teach them but herself.” If Jack and Jill had been time eaters, what could be said of the sixlets? Not only did Anne and Tommy spend almost all their hours out of school playing with the pups on the sunny slope, but their father had cut his chin several times from watching them out of his dressing-room window when he was shaving; their mother sewed the buttons on the wrong side of Anne’s pinafore, and Mary Anne poured kerosene into her lap instead of into the lamp, from the same cause. [Illustration] [Illustration: _On Guard._]