The little girl felt bad about this, but she was of too cheerful a temperament to droop for long under the pressure of any trouble. The other children liked her, and Carolyn May found plenty of playmates. She would never loiter with them, however, in the schoolyard at noon or after school. Instead, she would hurry home and release poor Prince from duress.
It had been found impossible to keep the dog on a chain. He had almost choked himself once, and again had torn his ears getting his collar off. So the strong chicken coop under the big tree in the back yard which had first been his prison was again his cell while his little mistress was at school.
“Of course,” Carolyn May said to Aunty Rose, “we mustn’t let poor Princey know it’s because of Miss Minnie that he has to be shut up. He might take a dislike to her, just as she has to him; and that would be dreadful! If she’d only let him, I know he’d lie down right outside the schoolroom door while I was inside, and be just as good!”
But Miss Minnie remained obdurate. She did not like any dogs, and in her eyes Prince was especially objectionable.
One of the bigger girls made up a rhyme about Carolyn May and Prince, which began:
“Car’lyn May had a mongrel dog,
Its coat was not white like snow;
And everywhere that Car’lyn went
That dog was sure to go.
“It followed her to school one day,
Which made Miss Minnie sore;
But when Car’lyn tied the mongrel up,
It was bound to bark and roar.”
There were many more verses; the big girl was always adding new ones.
“I don’t mind it—much,” Carolyn May confessed to Aunty Rose, “but I wouldn’t like Prince to hear that poetry. His feelings might be hurt.”
It was on the last Friday in the month that something happened which quite changed Miss Minnie’s attitude towards “that mongrel.” Incidentally, The Corners, as a community, was fully awakened from its lethargy, and, as it chanced, like the Sleeping Beauty and all her retinue, by a Prince.