"My poppet! my poppet!" cried Fifine, ecstatically, as a quaint and tiny wooden doll of a somewhat Dutch build and with both arms stretched out straight was fished out. She snuggled it up to her lips in rapture, then showed it to the cat, who evidently recognized it, and as it was danced seductively before her on the buffalo rug, put out her paw and with a delicate tentative gesture and intent brow was about to play with it after her fashion of toying with a mouse, when one of her claws caught in a mesh of the doll's bobinet skirt. Now the doll's finery, while limited in compass to minuteness, was very fine, and as Josephine's short shriek of indignation, "_Quelle barbarie!_" arose on the air, the cat turned around carrying the splendidly arrayed poppet off on her unwilling claw--to be lost, who knew where, in the wilderness! The frantic little owner seized the tail of the _mignonne toute chérie_, which sent up a wail of poignant discordance; the romping Hamish, with a wicked mimicry of the infantile babbling cry, "_Quelle barbarie!_" impeded the progress of Fifine by catching the skirt of her little jacket, called a josie; whereupon Odalie, imitating his dislocated French accent and boyish hoarseness in the exclamation, "_Quelle barbarie!_" laid hold upon his long curly hair, held together by a ribbon as an apology for a pig-tail. There ensued an excited scramble around on the buffalo rug before the fire, during which the horn was turned over and some of its small treasures escaped amidst the long fur. This brought Odalie to a pause, for the lost articles were buttons of French gilt, and they must be found in the fur and counted; for did they not belong to Sandy's best blue coat, and could not be dispensed with? In the course of the merry-go-round the cat's claw had become disentangled from the doll's frock. Fifine had released the clutch of reprisal on the cat's tail. Hamish had been visited with a fear that the end of Fifine's josie might give way in rents before her obstinacy would relax; and Odalie had not the heart to pull his hair with more cruelty than she had heretofore indulged. So the magic circle gave way by its own impulse as it had formed, and all the heads were once more bent together in earnest absorption in the search and the subsequent disclosures of the buffalo horn. Such choice symposia as these were usually reserved for the dusk of the afternoon in bad weather when the outdoor work was done, and Odalie--her house all in order--needed more light for her other vocations. It was quite incredible how soon a loom was set up and warping-bars constructed, and all the details in motion of that pioneer home life, which added the labor and interests of domestic manufacture to the other absorbing duties of the housewife that have survived in these times of machinery and delegated responsibility.