Mary Elizabeth and I were playing Dolls. We rarely did this on a pleasant day in Summer, Dolls being an indoor game, matched with carpets and furniture and sewing baskets rather than with blue sky and with the soft brilliance of the grass. But that day we had brought everything out in the side yard under the little catalpa tree, and my eleven dolls (counting the one without any face, and Irene Helena, the home-made one, and the two penny ones) were in a circle on chairs and boxes and their backs, getting dressed for the tea-party. There was always going to be a tea-party when you played Dolls--you of course had to lead up to something, and what else was there to lead up to save a tea-party? To be sure, there might be an occasional marriage, but boy-dolls were never very practical; they were invariably smaller than the bride-doll, and besides we had no mosquito-netting suitable for a veil. Sometimes we had them go for a walk, and once or twice we had tried playing that they were house-cleaning; but these operations were not desirable, because in neither of them could the dolls dress up, and the desirable part of playing dolls is, as everybody knows, to dress them in their best. That is the game. That, and the tea-party. “Blue or rose-pink?” Mary Elizabeth inquired, indicating the two best gowns of the doll she was dressing. It was a difficult question. We had never been able to decide which of these two colours we preferred. There was the sky for precedent of blue, but then rose-pink we loved so to say! [Illustration: SHE SETTLED EVERYTHING IN THAT WAY; SHE COUNTED THE PETALS OF FENNEL DAISIES AND BLEW THISTLE FROM DANDELIONS.] “If they’s one cloud in the sky, we’ll put on the rose-pink one,” said Mary Elizabeth. “And if there isn’t any, that’ll mean blue.” She settled everything that way--she counted the petals of fennel daisies, blew the thistle from dandelions, did one thing if she could find twelve acorns and another if they were lacking. Even then Mary Elizabeth seemed always to be watching for a guiding hand, to be listening for a voice to tell her what to do, and trying to find these in things of Nature.