A Little Maid in Toyland

by Adah Louise Sutton

As the Little Lamb was indeed very dirty, Sally prepared a kind of shampoo, such as she had often seen nurse concoct for her own use. This was composed of tar soap, melted over the fire to a kind of jelly, and then beaten up with a couple of eggs and a dash of borax. When it was finished, it made a yellow, frothy compound, altogether nice and delectable looking. Sally had made a liberal quantity, owing to the area that had to be covered in the personality of the Little Lamb. She left it on the kitchen table, and hurried off to find that worthy who, scenting an impending conflict, had betaken himself to the attic. Entrenched behind Bedelia’s screen, he firmly awaited the onslaught of the enemy.

Dinah had all this time been busy in the upper part of the house and now returning below stairs beheld the foamy, creamy mixture frothing over the pan on the kitchen table. It never entered into her wooden head to suppose that it was anything except some nice omelet or something of the kind that one of the dolls or perhaps Sally had knocked together for luncheon. Stirring it up with a spoon, she found it rather thin, and proceeded to thicken it with flour and finally decided that it would serve best as batter for griddle cakes. As she herself was extremely fond of lemon flavoring, she added a large dose of that, and then proceeded to bake the mess on the well-greased and sputtering griddle.

Now it must be confessed that Dinah was greedy, and the brown cakes certainly looked tempting. Besides, had she not planned something quite different for the dolls’ luncheon? Just one nibble she took, and then, like other people who have hesitated, she proceeded to get lost. Her wooden palate certainly failed to detect the flavor of tar soap, and one brown and smoking cake speedily disappeared after another. Goodness knows when she would have stopped had not Bedelia, attracted by the odor of the baking cakes, suddenly appeared in the kitchen.

That worthy had been decidedly out of favor with Sally for several days, and consequently was in no enviable frame of mind. Without so much as a “by your leave,” she now advanced on the greedy Dinah, snatched the plate of cakes from under her very nose, and proceeded to dispose of them with neatness and despatch. Her taste for eatables had been well cultivated, however, and she now discovered something decidedly peculiar in the flavor of the cakes. But she swallowed them all to the last crumb, more in order to spite Dinah than because she wanted them, pausing now and then between bites to utter a threatening little growl that served very effectually to keep Dinah at a distance, for the cook was dreadfully afraid of the Teddy Bears. It did not take very long for the soap and borax to get in some very fine work, and soon Dinah and Bedelia found themselves companions in misery.

When Sally had hunted all over the house without being able to find the Little Lamb—and no wonder, for he was safely entrenched under Bedelia’s bed in the attic—and came hurrying into the kitchen to look after her shampoo, she found two unutterably wretched individuals tied up in knots and rolling around on the kitchen floor. Had it been Bedelia alone, Sally would have suspected a trick, but Dinah’s sufferings were too genuine to admit of suspicion.

Sally flew for help without waiting for explanations, and in a short time the sufferers were tucked up in their beds, feeling decidedly more comfortable and listening to a lecture on gluttony which they did not soon forget. Not but that this same lecture had to be administered in two sections, one to Dinah in her room and one to Bedelia in the attic, for Dinah would have died sooner than lie down in the same room with the Teddy Bear that she now regarded with more fear and dislike than ever.

Thus it happened that Sally was flying around the shining little kitchen, putting things to rights and making ready to get together something for the dolls’ luncheon. She smiled as she scoured and dried the tin pan in which the shampoo, whose ending had been so unusual, had been mixed. She wondered what had become of the Little Lamb, and could not help wishing that he, instead of Dinah and Bedelia, had been the one to gobble up the sickening cakes, for the stuff certainly had been intended for him in the beginning.