"O, here you are, you little Hop-o'-my-thumb," said Mrs. Clifford, coming into the pantry; "a baby with a cough in her throat and pills in her pocket musn't get wet."
Flyaway thrust her hand into her wet pocket to make sure the wee vial of white dots was still there.
"I fished her out of a pail of water," said Horace; "to-morrow I shall find her in a bird's nest."
Mrs. Clifford sent for some fresh stockings and shoes. Her baby-daughter was so often falling into mischief that she thought very little about it. She did not know this was a remarkable occasion, and the baby had to-day begun to remember. She did not know that if Flyaway should live to be an old lady, she would sometimes say to her grandchildren,—
"The very first thing I have any recollection of, dears, is grinding coffee in your great-grandmamma's kitchen at Willowbrook. The girl, Ruth Dillon, took me up by the shoulders, carried me through the air, and set me in the sink, and then I pumped water over myself."
This is about the way little Flyaway would be likely to talk, sixty years from now, adding, as she polished her spectacles,—
"And after that, children, things went into a mist, and I don't remember anything else that happened for some time."
Why was it that things "went into a mist"? Why didn't she keep on remembering every day? I don't know.
But the next thing that really did happen to Miss Thistleblow Flyaway, though she went right off and forgot it, was this: She persuaded her mother to write a letter for her to "Dotty Dimpwill." As it was her first letter, I will copy it.
"My dear Dotty Dimpwill first, then My Prudy: