Milly and Olly | Page 5

and meddling with everything, indoors and out, to see what was inside it, or what it was made of. He liked teasing Milly, he liked his walks, he liked his sleep in the morning, he liked his dinner, he liked his tea, he liked everything in the world, except learning to read, and that he hated. He could only do one thing besides mischief. He could sing all kinds of tunes--quick tunes, slow tunes, and merry tunes. He had been able to sing tunes ever since he was quite a tiny baby, and his father and mother often talked together of how, in about a year, he should be taught to play on the piano, or perhaps on the violin, if he liked it better. You might hear his sharp, shrill little voice, singing about the house and the garden all day long. John the gardener called it "squealin'," and told Olly his songs were "capital good" for frightening away the birds.
Now, perhaps, you know a little more about Milly and Olly than you did when I began to tell you about them, and it is time you should hear of what happened to them on that wonderful journey of theirs up to the mountains.
First of all came the packing up. Milly could not make up her mind about her dolls; she had three--Rose, Mattie, and Katie--but Rose's frocks were very dirty, Mattie had a leg broken, and Katie's paint had been all washed off one wet night, when Olly left her out on the lawn. Now which of these was the tidiest and most respectable doll to take out on a visit? Milly did not know how to settle it.
[Illustration: "'I can't do without my toys, Nana'"]
"I think, Nana," she said at last to her nurse, who was packing the children's trunk, "I will take Katie. Mother always sends us away when we get white faces to make us look nice and red again; so, perhaps, if I take Katie her colour will come back too, you know."
"Perhaps it will, Miss Milly," said nurse, laughing; "anyhow, you had better give me the doll you want directly, for it is time I packed all the toys now. Now, Master Olly, you know I can't let you take all those things."
For there was Olly dragging along his wheelbarrow heaped up with toys with one hand, and his cart and horse with a box of bricks standing up in it with the other. He would not listen to what Milly said about it, and he would scarcely listen to nurse now.
"I can't do without my toys, Nana. I must do mischief if you won't let me take all my toys; I can't help it."
"I haven't got room for half those, Master Olly, and you'll have ever so many new things to play with when we get to Ravensnest."
"There'll be the new children, Olly," said Milly, "and the little rivers and all the funny new flowers."
"Those aren't toys," said Olly, looking ready to cry. "I don't know nothing about them."
"Now," said nurse, making a place in the box, "bring me your bricks and your big ball, and your picture-books. There, that's all I can spare you."
"Wait one minute," said Olly, rushing off; and just then Mrs. Norton called nurse away to speak to her in the drawing-room. When nurse came back she saw nobody in the nursery. Milly had gone out in the garden, Olly was nowhere to be seen. And who had shut down the trunk, which was open when she left it? Me-ow, sounded very softly from somewhere close by.
"Why--Spot! Spot!" called nurse.
Me-ow, Me-ow, came again; a sad choky little mew, right from the middle of the children's trunk. "Master Olly and his tricks again," said nurse, running to the box and opening it. There, on the top, lay a quantity of frocks that nurse had left folded up on the floor, thrown in anyhow, with some toys scattered among them, and the frocks and toys were all dancing up and down as if they were bewitched. Nurse took out the frocks, and there was the children's collar-box, a large round cardboard-box with a lid, jumping from side to side like a box in a fairy tale; and such dreadful pitiful little mews coming from the inside! Nurse undid the lid, and out sprang Spot like a flash of lightning, and ran as if she were running for her life out of the door and down the stairs, and safe into the kitchen, where she cuddled herself up in a corner of the fender, wishing with all her poor trembling little heart that there were no such things in the world as small boys. And then nurse heard a kind of kicking and scuffling in the china cupboard, and when she