Dogtown: Being Some Chapters from the Annals of the Waddles Family Set Down in the Language of HousepeopleWright, Mabel Osgood
General
Dogtown: Being Some Chapters from the Annals of the Waddles Family Set Down in the Language of Housepeople
Wright, Mabel Osgood
Dogs -- Juvenile fiction
When Miss Letty had been two months at the Hilltop Farm everybody
had fallen in love with her, twofoots and fourfoots alike. That is,
everybody but Mr. Hugh; he was simply polite and tolerant, treating her
new enthusiasm for dogs, horses, and outdoor things as merely the whim
of a spoiled child.
Miss Letty had packed her Paris finery away in Miss Jule’s big garret,
excepting a few pretty things for evening wear, and went about in white
duck skirts and dainty white shirt waists, belts and ties, for as she
said, “If you are much with dogs and horses, it isn’t enough to have
gowns that will wash, you must have things that are boilable.”
So Tommy changed her name from Flower Lady to White Lady, and doubled
his devotion, recklessly buying three cookie cutters at the ten-cent
store in town,--a heart, a rabbit, and a rooster,--that his offerings
of ginger cakes and jumbles coaxed from cook might not lack variety.
The heart and rooster cookies were sure to be in good condition when
Miss Letty received them, but the rabbit offered greater temptation to
Tommy in transit. It was a queerly built rabbit, and stood very high on
its legs. Tommy discovered that if the legs were nibbled off carefully
and evenly, bunny looked as if he was lying down, so if the cookie
was particularly crisp, and temptation overcame him, he soothed his
scruples by telling Miss Letty that “to-day the rabbit is tired.”
As for Anne, she had found a companion after her own heart, for Miss
Letty was as happy in her newly found freedom as a young house-bred
animal having its first taste of liberty. Anne offered to give up Fox,
but it was not necessary, for Miss Letty could control Miss Jule’s own
mount Kate by merely a pat on the neck, and together the two girls--for
at this time Miss Letty was as young as Anne--explored every wood path
in the vicinity, having an escort of Dogtown police in the shape of Mr.
Wolf, Quick, Tip, and Waddles to protect them, with Colin as a sort of
clown to amuse them when they rested.
At first Miss Letty spoke in French to Anne, because her mother asked
it and it was really her own tongue, but she soon stopped, saying
frankly that it seemed as much out of place in New England wood and
farm life as her lace frills or Hamlet’s long curls and bracelets,
while Anne’s Indian names for beasts and birds caught her fancy, and
Miss Letty was as quick as Anne in detecting an unusual bird note, even
though she might not know the name of the bird.
In fact, she was rather slow in learning to name birds by sight, and
came galloping down so often to tell Anne that there were some great
strange birds in the meadow, with green and blue feathers, when they
were only crows, or perhaps grackles seen in the bright sun, that it
came to be quite a joke. But if she once learned a bird’s name from
hearing its song, she never forgot it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account