“Tiny, I do believe that Bunch has gone down to the Midgetts’. You must go and find her before you eat your dinner; and hurry, now.”
“O, dear! can’t she hear the dinner bell just as well as I can?” and off flew Tiny, with the streamers of her jockey standing straight out behind her, and her new buttoned shoes spattering water from every mud-puddle in her way.
We were not invited; so we can’t stay to dinner; but perhaps we will have time to learn something about the little ones while Tiny is hunting her tardy sister Bunch.
Her name was not really Bunch; that is, she was not christened so. At school she answered “Present” at roll-call to the prettier name of Florence; but uncle Tim—he’s such a jolly fellow!—said, when he first held her in her delicately-embroidered blankets, that she was such a bouncer, so red and so dumpy, that she would never be anything but a bunch; and so dubbed, she carries the name to this day. But did not she disappoint him, though! for, in some unaccountable way, she daily stretched long, and flattened out, and became thin and bony. Her collar-bone grew to be a perfect shelf, and her stockings got a very awkward fashion of wrinkling about her ankles.
Soon after, when Tiny’s little red face began to screw and squint at uncle Tim, she was such a mite that he was sure to be right this time if he nicknamed her Tiny; and she was so little, that an ordinary pillow made her a bed of a comfortable size; and all the old cronies in the village whispered that the new baby would either die off pretty quick, or live to be a second Mrs. Tom Thumb. But Tiny lived, and spited them, and waxed fat and bunchy, while Bunch astonished them all by waning lean and tiny.
Jelly’s name came no one knew how. Some mischievous sprite probably whispered it to her; for she persisted that it was her name; and so she was indulged in it.
Near their home was a vacant lot—vacant, excepting for a one-story shanty, with a cellar, piles of broken crockery, old shoes, dislocated hoop skirts, and bushes of rank stramoniums, with their big, poisonous blossoms. Cows strayed in the lot, munching the ugly snarls of grass, and the neighbors’ pigs and fowls made a daily promenade through the wilderness of refuse.
Although it seemed a very unattractive place for a neat little girl to visit, now especially, since a pipe of the great sewer had overflowed, and had deluged parts of the ground. But to that miserable shanty mamma believed her little Bunch to have strayed; and there Tiny found her, seated on a log of wood in the corner of the largest room, with her apron thrown over her face and the Midgett girls—there were two of them—first staring at her, and then winking at each other.