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