"Gordon setters, black and tan: oh, she says they are perfect beauties. She says—this is Jean, you know, my sister—'they are all like Semmy except one, and he is blue.' Who ever heard of a blue puppy? You shall have one, Snowy: I promised you one, don't you remember? oh—eee! and the new colt is a perfect beauty too, and they have named her Peggy. Oh!"
Peggy looked down at her letter, then looked up again shyly. "I—don't suppose you would care to hear any of it?" she said, interrogatively.
"Indeed we should!" said Mrs. Merryweather, heartily. "We should like it extremely, Peggy. A letter from the Far West; why, it will be a journey for all of us."
"Great!" said Phil.
"Corking!" said Gerald. And one and all, in their several ways, expressed their desire to hear the letter.
Dimpling with pleasure, her rosy face beaming, Peggy began to read.
"'Dear old'—oh, well, I won't read just the beginning, because it is just the way we talk to each other, you know. I wish you knew Jean, Snowy. Let me see! oh, yes, here it is.
"'This is eight birthdays all at once, for what do you think, Peggy? this morning we missed Semmy at breakfast, and could not find her anywhere. There were kidneys, and you know she always finishes the dish off, because she is so fond of them. Well, and so I went to look for her, and she wasn't in her box, or in the shed, or behind the kitchen stove, or anywhere where she usually is. So I went out to the stable, and there I heard little squeaks and squeals, the funniest you ever heard, and then a growl in Semmy's voice as I opened the door. Then the dear thing heard my step, and was ashamed of growling, and began thumping her tail on the floor till I should have thought she would break it. And there she was, all cuddled down in a pile of hay, and the dear little darling things all cuddled round her. I never saw anything so perfectly dear! they were all blind, and bald all over, and pink, and squealing like anything; you never did see anything so lovely in all your life, at least I never did. Well, she let me take them up, one by one, old darling, though I could see that it made her nervous. Most of them are like her, beautifully marked, with pink noses, and black ears, and just the right blackness and tanness on them; but one is very queer, great splotches of black on his nose and his hind quarters, and all the rest of him white. So they named him "Magpie," right off; but I haven't come to the names yet. He is not very pretty, but he looks very bright, and I shouldn't wonder if he was terribly clever, to make up for not being so handsome as the others. And the other different one is a perfect beauty, though you may not think so when I tell you that he is blue. Yes, truly blue; of course I don't mean sky blue, nor navy, but the black is all mixed in through the white,—I can't explain to you just how it is—but anyhow, at a little distance, he does truly and honestly look blue. Well, so—I was the first to find them, so Father said I might name them, but of course I wanted us all to do it together; so we all thought, and each made a list. Oh, Peggy, we did want you; and I wanted to wait till you could send your list too, but the others thought you would not mind, and it is nicer to have them named quickly, because then their names seem to belong to them more, and they look like them. Perhaps, I mean, if you had been called something else till you were two or three years old, you might not have been so just exactly Peggy as you are, you dear old thing.'
"Perhaps I ought not to have read that," said Peggy, looking up with a blush; "but it is as like Jean as I am like Peggy, if I am like it, whatever it is."
"You certainly are like 'it,'" said Gertrude, laughing, "and 'it' certainly is a dear old thing. Go on, please. We are all longing to hear the list."