VERY early next morning Sally was wakened by Rough House, who was standing up on his hind legs beside her bed, licking her face and occasionally uttering a short, sharp bark.
As soon as he saw that she was wide awake he ran toward the door and then back to the bed, pulling at Sally’s nightgown, and plainly begging her to follow him.
Sally jumped out of bed at once, hastily stuck her little pink toes into her red bedroom slippers, a new pair, kept carefully in a convenient hidie-hole where the dog’s greatest ingenuity could never discover them, and threw over her nightie a dainty silk kimono on which were embroidered a succession of smiling Japanese ladies, each one sitting under a cherry tree in full bloom and holding over her head a wonderful Japanese umbrella, which seemed to be entirely unnecessary in view of the shade that must have been cast by the cherry tree. It was, moreover, faced with pink satin, and was quite the most delightful article in Sally’s wardrobe.
The little girl hastily followed the dog, who had started downstairs, pausing now and then to look back and make sure that Sally was following.
Down the stairs they hastened and as they reached the lower flight sounds of woe were wafted to them from the kitchen. Thither they hastened to find cook crying and wringing her hands over the dreadful outlook.
Immediately Sally thought of Marius at the ruins of Carthage, and Herculaneum and Pompeii, stories that she had learned from her governess; but she forbore to mention them, as cook was not exactly in a frame of mind just then to absorb ancient history.
The little girl longed to rush forward and comfort her friend whom she had remembered from babyhood. But the kitchen floor was in such a fearfully sticky mess with jam and pickles and scraps of cake and pie that she could only hover on the outskirts, calling out her condolences to cook, who for once in her life failed to pay the smallest attention to her little favorite.
Just then John, the man who did all the chores about the house, came stumping up the cellar stairs. He had gone down to attend to the furnace, but had found something in the coal bin that sent him straight back again as fast as his rheumatic leg would allow.
He now appeared in the doorway with his arms full of Peter Pan and his family, all of which he proceeded to solemnly deposit in the middle of the floor. And a more demoralized, disreputable looking bunch one could never conceive or imagine.