THE LAND OF LOST TOYS.

AN EARTHQUAKE IN THE NURSERY.


It was certainly an aggravated offence. It is generally understood in
families that "boys will be boys," but there is a limit to the
forbearance implied in the extenuating axiom. Master Sam was condemned
to the back nursery for the rest of the day.

He always had had the knack of breaking his own toys,--he not
unfrequently broke other people's; but accidents will happen, and his
twin-sister and factotum, Dot, was long-suffering.

Dot was fat, resolute, hasty, and devotedly unselfish. When Sam scalped
her new doll, and fastened the glossy black curls to a wigwam
improvised with the curtains of the four-post bed in the best bedroom,
Dot was sorely tried. As her eyes passed from the crown-less doll on
the floor to the floss-silk ringlets hanging from the bed-furniture,
her round rosy face grew rounder and rosier, and tears burst from her
eyes. But in a moment more she clenched her little fists, forced back
the tears, and gave vent to her favourite saying, "I don't care."

That sentence was Dot's bane and antidote; it was her vice and her
virtue. It was her standing consolation, and it brought her into all
her scrapes. It was her one panacea for all the ups and downs of her
life (and in the nursery where Sam developed his organ of
destructiveness there were ups and downs not a few); and it was the
form her naughtiness took when she was naughty.