'Well,' replied Joe, with an important air, 'it do be a present for Miss Peggy, it be. She were that disappointed about the guinea-pig as Mrs. Davenport promised to give her, and forgot all about, that I says to myself, "I must make it up to her some ways, if I gets the chance." So I walks over to my granny's at Marlow last night, and I begs a black pup off her, and here it is.'
Joe drew aside his jacket, and disclosed to the children's delighted eyes the sweetest little round fuzzy ball of black fluff, just like a tiny woolly bear, with tan chest and paws, and a wagging morsel of a tail like a black tassel. It had the brightest of brown eyes, the pinkest of tongues, and the shrillest of barks, and it was altogether such a dear, enchanting, soft, curly morsel of puppyhood that Peggy took it to her arms and her heart at the same moment.
'Oh, thank you, Joe!' she exclaimed, almost too pleased to speak.
'Granny has five of 'em, miss,' said Joe; 'but I picked out the best. It'll make a grand dog, it will, when it's growed, and master was sayin' only the other day as he could do with another collie to train in old Rover's place.'
'Let me have him a moment!' begged Bobby, hugging the wriggling burden, which Peggy unwillingly relinquished.
'What shall you call the darling?' inquired Lilian, kissing the funny black nose that was smelling at her buttons.
'I think Rollo would be a jolly name, and of course we can all have a piece of him all the same, though he's mine,' announced Peggy magnanimously, for the Vaughans always shared their good things with one another.
They had a perfect menagerie of pets at the Abbey. First there were the rabbits, five white ones and two black, which lived in a little hutch behind the stackyard. They did not do very much except nibble at bran and lettuce-leaves, it is true, but they were pretty, soft creatures, with long, silky ears, and it was fun sometimes to let them out for a scamper on the granary floor. Then there was Prickles, a bright little hedgehog, which Peggy had rescued from some village boys who were using the poor little fellow as a football. She had brought him home, and fed him on bread and milk, and he soon got to know her, and would come when she called him, and allow her to scratch the end of his funny pink nose. Prickles generally slept most of the day in a snug box lined with hay, but in the evenings he woke up, and Peggy would carry him into the kitchen, where he devoured black-beetles, much to his own delight and Nancy's satisfaction.
Jack, the magpie, had fallen from his nest in the fir-tree when still an ugly little half-fledged creature with a wide, gaping mouth. The children had made a nest of grass for him inside a basket, and fed him on worms and scraps of raw meat until he was old enough to fly, when he would follow them everywhere about the farmyard and outbuildings, calling 'Jack, Jack!' which, with the mewing of a cat, the gobble of the old turkey-cock, and a close imitation of David's winter cough, made up the extent of his accomplishments.
Nancy kept him sternly out of the kitchen, for he was terribly mischievous, and seemed to take a positive delight in playing practical jokes. He had purloined David's scarf from the saddle-room, and dropped it into the horse-trough, had filled Bobby's hat with pebbles, and devoured the queen-cakes which Lilian had placed on the kitchen window-sill to cool; he had snatched Joe's breast-pin—a glittering imitation diamond—from his Sunday tie, under the very nose of that injured youth, and had stolen so many small articles that if anything were missing the children would have a grand search for Master Jack's hiding-place, and would generally turn out the lost treasure from among an odd collection of trifles—scraps of bright-coloured rags, bits of broken glass, hairpins, pen-nibs, pencil-ends, together with pieces of bread and half-picked bones which the thief had concealed in some cunning corner inside a manger or under the roof of the loft.