The kitchen door was ajar. The dish-pan was in the sink, the kettle was steaming on the stove. And from out the dining-room abruptly appeared Calista and _Delia_, bearing plates. “Girls!” I cried, but Mary Elizabeth was dumb. Delia carefully set down her plate in the dish-pan and addressed me: “Well, you needn’t think you’re the only one that knows what’s proper, miss,” she said. Calista was more simple. “We wanted to get ’em all done before you got back,” she owned. “We would, if Margaret Amelia and Betty had of come. They wanted to, but they wouldn’t let ’em.” Back of Delia and Calista appeared the mistress of the house. She had on her afternoon dress, and her curl papers were out, and she actually smiled at Mary Elizabeth and me. “_Now_ then!” she said to us. * * * * * If I could have made a dream for that night, I think it would have been that ever and ever so many of us were sitting in rows, waiting to be counted. And a big sun came by, whirling and growing, to take us, and we thought we couldn’t all get in. But there was room, whether we had been counted or not. XI DOLLS The advent of the New Boy changed the face of the neighbourhood. Formerly I had been accustomed to peep through cracks in the fence only to look into a field of corn that grew at the side; or, on the other side, into raspberry bushes, where at any moment raspberries might be gathered and dropped over the fence to me. Also, there was one place in the deep green before those bushes where blue-eyed grass grew, and I had to watch for that. Then there was a great spotted dog that sometimes came, and when he had passed, I used to wait long by the high boards lest he should return and leap at me to whom, so far, he had never paid the slightest attention. As a child, my mother had once jumped down into a manger where a great spotted dog was inadvertently lying and, though from all accounts he was far more frightened than she, yet I feared his kind more than any other.... The only real excitement that we had been wont to know in the neighbourhood occurred whenever there was a Loose Horse. Somebody would give the alarm, and then we would all make sure that the gates were latched and we would retire to watch him fearfully, where he was quietly cropping the roadside grass. But sometimes, too, a Loose Horse would run--and then I was terrified by the sound of his hoofs galloping on the sidewalk and striking on the bricks and boards. I was always afraid that a Loose Horse would see me, and nights, after one had disturbed our peace, I would dream that he was trying to find me, and that he had come peering between the dining-room blinds; and though I hid under the red cotton spread that was used “between-meals,” it never came down far enough, and he always stood there interminably waiting, and found me, through the fringe.