“Yes; and she repeated the trick for several days. She was a very cunning lamb, and would watch her chance, standing on her hind feet, to eat the bark from the young trees, and pull the slender twigs down toward the ground with her fore leg.”
“Can you remember any thing more about her?” timidly inquired Minnie.
“Dinner is ready,” answered the lady, smiling. “We shall not have time now; but Harry may tell you about Hatty.”
Harry stood up very straight, his bright eyes sparkling with pleasure; then, with a motion peculiar to him, tossing the curls from his forehead, and turning to Minnie, he said, in an animated tone, “Every morning I have my lessons with mamma; but Hatty doesn’t like me to study, because she wants to be playing, you know. At first, she cried so much that I couldn’t get on at all well, until mamma put my stool close to the door. You see it is glass, and she could look through the panes. So she lies on the piazza outside, with her nose as close as she can get it to me.”
“And her loving eyes fixed on his face,” added mamma, smiling at Minnie’s earnest gaze.
“Isn’t it funny,” cried the boy, leaning toward his young visitor, “for her to sit still till my lessons are learned, so that I can say them all by heart?
“O, mamma!” he shouted, “there’s Hatty now.”
And, true enough, the affectionate creature had followed them around the house to the dining room, and there she stood butting against the glass, to get to her dear little master.
“I do think,” cried Minnie, enthusiastically, “that Hatty is the very best lamb I ever saw.”