It was Big Brother who threw bones in the air for them, and gave them their first taste of meat by bringing home a young woodchuck, and dragging it into their midst; when they sprang upon it with a fierceness that seemed almost to frighten gentle Jack, and a tug-of-war ensued in earnest, which ended in the woodchuck’s tail giving way and Dinah turning a back somersault, it was saucy Phœbe who dragged away the prize, and the others licked their lips with gusto.
“Never mind,” said Miss Jule, “when it comes time for the hunting Happy will let no one teach them but herself.”
If Jack and Jill had been time eaters, what could be said of the sixlets? Not only did Anne and Tommy spend almost all their hours out of school playing with the pups on the sunny slope, but their father had cut his chin several times from watching them out of his dressing-room window when he was shaving; their mother sewed the buttons on the wrong side of Anne’s pinafore, and Mary Anne poured kerosene into her lap instead of into the lamp, from the same cause.
On Guard.
The Hilltop people also were interested, in spite of their many dogs; and Miss Jule, Miss Letty, Mr. Hugh, and Squire Burley all happened in together the afternoon that Anne’s father had finished printing and mounting his puppy pictures, and they begged so hard for copies of them, that he said he should have to make them into an album and let them draw lots for it. While Anne begged for a pair to frame, one of the sixlets all together, four in a basket, and two on the garden bench, and the other of Dick, Bobwhite, Dinah, and Phœbe in a wheelbarrow, with Jack Waddles standing guard like a veritable policeman.
“I like this picture best,” said Mr. Hugh, picking up a small photograph of Miss Letty feeding Miss Jule’s kennel dogs; “it’s very lifelike.”