Little Miss By-The-Day | Page 6

was usually-- Babiche.
Babiche was so old that she whined at the evening chill; she perpetually
teased to be taken back to her comfortable cushion at the foot of her
mistress's bed. She was really very amusing when she sat up on her
haunches and begged to be carried. For she was so fat that she hated to
walk and she was a very spoiled doggy, that wee spaniel! A sort of a
dowager queen of a doggy, a nice little old grandma lady of a dog.
The gentle yap-yap-yapping that could always be heard beyond the rear

wall was from the throats of some score or more of her expensive
great-great-great offspring who lived in the stable in tiny stalls with
their pedigree cards tacked neatly under their elaborate kennel names.
It was a cross to Felice that she was not allowed to go through the small
arched doorway at the back of the garden that led to the stable that
opened on the narrow cobblestone "Tradespersons' Street." The Major
didn't approve of the manners of Zeb Smathers the kennel man, or
Zeb's wife Marthy, though he knew there wasn't a pair with their
patience and skill to be found for miles around. All the same Felice
adored the stable yard and would have dearly loved to climb the narrow
stairs up to the low-ceilinged rooms above the stables where Marthy
liked to sit.
Lean, grizzled old Marthy! There was usually a dog or two in her lap,
either a sickly pup or a grieving-eyed mother dog whose babies had
been taken away from her. Such tiny creatures, even the mother dogs--
those little Blenheim spaniels! Snub-nosed, round-headed with long
silky flopping ears, soft curly coats and feathery tails. Felice liked the
yellow and white ones, and always reached for them, but her
grandfather coolly "weeded them out," as Zeb expressed it, because the
Trenton ideal was a white dog marked with red.
Felicia knew when the dogs were going away. They always went the
day after the Basket Man came with a pole tied full of oval gilded
wicker hampers. Sometimes she, was allowed to stand in the gateway
and watch them have their farewell bath, only of course she sniffed
uncomfortably when Zeb let brown drops drip into the rinsing water
from a fat bottle with a gay red skull and cross-bones on the label.
"Scarbolic" was what she understood it to be, she mustn't touch it or
she'd "go dead," whatever that was. But she forgot all about the smell
as she watched the fluffy doggies drying in the sunny stable yard while
Marthy sang vociferously to cheer her own drooping spirits; the silly
old woman never could bear the days the dogs went away.
And so Felice on her side of the gate could listen rapturously to the
throaty drone in which Marthy asked the world

"What's this dull town to me? Rob-in's not here--"
or warbled heavily
"Churry Ripe, Churry Ripe, Who'll buy my churries--"
or wailed
"Where have you been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy? Where have you been,
charming Billy?"
It almost made up for not being allowed to go out of the garden.
If Felice only could have been allowed to go around into the
Tradespersons' Street just once! I wish she could have gone--just once!
On one of the days when the swinging sign, that was gilded and painted
so beautifully, was hung outside to announce
"KING CHARLES AND BLENHEIM SPANIELS For sale within."
I'm sure she would have loved the line of carriages waiting in the
cobble-stoned alley when the fine ladies came to buy. I think she would
have clapped her hands at the gay boxes of geraniums and the crisp
white curtains in Marthy's shining windows over the stable door.
But she could only stay in the garden with the thin visaged old French
woman who taught her to read and to write and to embroider and to
play upon an old lute and to curtsy and to dance. One thing she learned
that the French woman did not teach her--to whistle! She remembers
answering the sea-gulls who mewed outside in the harbor and the
sparrows who twittered in the ivy and the tiny pair of love-birds who
dwelt in a cage at her mother's bedroom window. She learned to
whistle without distorting her lips because her grandfather had
forbidden her to whistle and if she held her mouth almost normal he
couldn't tell when he looked out into the garden whether it was Felice
or the birds who were twittering.
Her first memories of her mother were extremely vague. She

remembers she was pretty and smiling and that most of the time she lay
in a "sleighback" bed and that in the morning she would say,
"Go out into the