Punch pricked up his ears, and began to bark. His big friend Toby across the way, Mrs. Porter’s dog, was barking, and little Punch never let Toby make more noise than he did if he could help it. Toby had espied a wagon coming up the hill. Very soon Punch saw it too through the trees, and then he knew what he had been barking about.
Dear, merry Mrs. Chick was in the wagon. She had come to town to buy her a dress, she said. And where was her little Lucy?
Lucy soon appeared on her tricycle, to the great delight of Mrs. Chick.
“I like to see the ducklings swim,” she said; “but it isn’t half so pretty a sight as my little girl dancing along on that fizzy-me-jig wheel with all sails flying.”
Mrs. Chick wanted to take two of the children home with her to stay all night, and Edith and Jimmy were only too glad to be allowed to go.
“This time I may churn butter, mayn’t I, Mrs. Chick?” said Jimmy. “You always said I might churn butter some time in that pretty green churn.”
“So you shall, if you get up early enough, my boy; so you shall,” said the good-natured woman cheerily. “The cream will be all ready in the morning by five o’clock. Do you like to get up at five o’clock?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I do, if you’ll call me, Mrs. Chick.”
Mrs. Chick lived several miles away, on a ranch or farm. If her ranch had been all paid for she would have been a rich woman. She had lemon-trees, and a little lemon-house to dry the lemons in; she had orange and fig and olive trees, and so many different kinds of roses that she couldn’t remember all their names to save her life. The palm-trees had trunks that looked like enormous pine-apples. One queer tree with rough bark was called a “monkey-tree.” Mrs. Chick said she didn’t know why, unless it was because a monkey couldn’t climb it!