"You had better run on, or your little friends will grow impatient waiting for you, my dear. Put your Rabbit away, and hurry along now."
So Madeline put her Rabbit on a shelf in the playroom, and went out to play, and her mother gave Joe money for pins, needles and some court-plaster.
"Maybe I have good luck and make a lot of money to-day, and then I buy Rosa a nice Candy Rabbit for herself," the peddler said to himself, as he went down the street.
And, while I am about it, I might as well tell you that Joe did buy Rosa a nice Rabbit for herself. He took it home to her that night, lifting it out of his basket and putting it into her hands.
When the organ grinder's little girl awakened and found that her peddler uncle had gone, taking his basket and the Rabbit she had put to sleep in it without his knowledge, Rosa felt very bad. She was sad as she gathered pennies for her father that day.
But at night, when Uncle Joe came back with a new Candy Rabbit, Rosa was happy again. And Madeline was happy with her own Easter toy.
Rosa's uncle and her father told her it was wrong to have taken another little girl's toy without asking, and she was sorry when she understood that, but she was happy with her new plaything.
In the afternoon Mirabell and Dorothy went home with Madeline.
"I want to show you my Candy Rabbit again," Madeline said to her little girl chums.
And when Mirabell and Dorothy had looked at the Rabbit, seeing the speck of green paint on one ear and the other ear that was a little bent from the heat, Madeline said: