“’Next morning at breakfast father said:  “Tommy, how came the dog in the upper hall last night?  I told you to tie him up in the shed-chamber.”  Then I had to own up, and tell how I went late in the evening and brought him to my room because he howled so.  I said I was real sorry, and father said he would try to forgive me, seeing it all turned out well, and if Grip hadn’t been there we should have lost so much money.  And says I:  “Father, don’t you mean to take him round to Station C this morning?” “No, I don’t,” says father.  Then mother said she didn’t know but she’d about as soon lose the silver as to keep such a dog as that in the house, and Fred said if I must have a dog, why didn’t father get me a black-and-tan terrier—­“or a lovely pug,” says Liz; and between ’em they got me so stirred up I didn’t know what to do.  I said I didn’t want a black-and-tan, and I’d throw a pug out of the window!  And if nobody wanted to keep Grip, we’d go off together somewhere and earn our living, and I guessed the next time burglars got into the house and carried off all the money and things because we weren’t there to stop ’em, they’d be sorry they ’d treated us so.  Then I looked out of the window and winked hard to keep from crying.  Wasn’t I a silly?

“’For they were only teasing me, and every one of them wanted to keep Grip.  Well, that’s all.  No, it isn’t quite all either; for one morning a man came to the house and wanted to see father—­horrid man with a red face and a squint in one eye.  I remembered him right away.  He was one of the crowd looking on at the dog-fight down in River Street.  He said he’d lost a dog, a very valuable dog, and he’d heard we’d got him.  Father asked what kind of a dog, and he said yellow, and went on describing our Grip exactly, till I couldn’t hold in another minute for fear father would let him have the dog.  So I got round behind father’s chair and whispered:  “Buy him, father! buy him!”

“’Fred called me a great goony, and said if I’d kept still father could have got the dog for half what he paid for him.  Just because Fred is sixteen he thinks he knows every thing, and he’s always lording it over me.  He says I’ll never make a business man—­I ain’t sharp enough.  But I think five dollars is cheap enough for a dog that can tackle a burglar and scare off tramps and pedlars—­don’t you?’”

CHAPTER VII.

ONE DAY IN A MODEL CITY.

“I will tell you, to-day,” said Miss Ruth, after the members of her Society were quietly settled at their work, “about a race of little people who lived thousands and thousands of years ago.  When the great trees were growing, out of which the coal we use was made, this race inhabited the earth as they do now in great numbers.  We know this because their bodies are found perfectly preserved in pieces of coal and amber.  Amber, you know, is a kind of gum that drops from certain trees and hardens, becoming very transparent and of a pretty yellow color.  It is supposed that the little creatures found imbedded in it came to their death in running up the trunks of these trees, their feet sticking in the soft gum, and drop by drop trickling down on them till they were fast imprisoned in a beautiful transparent tomb.