Perfectly dreadful things were always happening to Dot Kenway’s Alice-doll. That child certainly was born under an unlucky star, as Mrs. MacCall often declared.
Yet she was the most cherished of all the smallest Corner House girl’s large and growing family of doll-babies. Dot lived with the Alice-doll in a world of make-believe, and where romance lapped over the border of reality it was hard for Dot to tell.
The children—Dot and Tess—fed the birds from the bedroom windows whenever the snow was on the ground. And Neale, when he was at hand, hung pieces of fat and suet in the trees for the jays and shrikes, and other of the “meat-eaters.”
The smaller birds were so tame that they hopped right upon the window-sills to eat. On one sill Neale had built a rather ingeniously contrived “sleeping porch” for the Alice-doll, in which Dot put her—bundled in Uncle Rufus’ napkin-bag—every night. The screened side served as a ventilator for the children’s bedroom.
The top of this boxlike arrangement was of oiled paper, pasted over a wooden frame, and one eager sparrow, pecking at crumbs on the taut paper, burst a hole right through; so he, or another, hopped saucily down through the hole and tried to peck out the Alice-doll’s bead-like eyes!
“Why—why—you cannibal!” gasped Dot, and ran to her child’s rescue.
With a frightened chirp the sparrow shot up through the torn paper and winged his flight over the housetop.
“You’ll have to paste up that hole, Dot,” Tess said, “or something more than a sparrow will get in at your Alice-doll.”
“Oh, me! what shall I do?” moaned Dot. “Alice must sleep in her porch. The doctors all say so.”
“I’ve a piece of silk you may have to paste over the top of your porch, honey,” Ruth said. “That will let the light through, and the birds won’t peck it to shreds.”