Then Dotty would plant both feet firmly on Susy’s chest, and say, in her teasing little voice, as troublesome as the hum of a mosquito,—­

“Won’t you tell me ’tory—­tell me a ’tory—­tell me a ’tory, Susy.”

“Well, what do you want to hear?”

Now, it was natural for Susy to feel cross when she was sleepy.  It cost her a hard struggle to speak pleasantly, and when she succeeded in doing so, I set it down as one of her greatest victories over herself.  The Quaker motto of her grandmother, “Let patience have her perfect work,” helped her sometimes, when she could wake up enough to remember it.

“Tell ’bout little yellow gell,” said the voice of the mosquito, over and over again.

Susy roused herself after the third request, and sleepily asked if something else wouldn’t do?

“I had a little nobby-colt.”

“No, no, you di’n’t, you di’n’t; grandma had the nobby!  Tell yellow gell.”

“O,” sighed Susy, “how can you want to hear that so many, many times?  Well, once when I was a little bit of a girl—­”

“’Bout’s big as me, you said,” put in Dotty.

“O, yes, I did say so once, and I suppose I must tell it so every time, or you’ll fuss!  Well, I had a yellow dress all striped off in checks—­”

“Di’n’t it go this way?” said Dotty, smoothing the sheet with her little hand, “and this way?”

“What?  What?” Susy roused herself and rubbed her eyes.  “O, yes, it went in checks; and I was at grandma Parlin’s, and Grace—­Grace—­O, Grace and I went into the pasture where there were a couple of cows, a gray cow and a red cow.”

“Now you must say what is couple,” says Dotty.

“Then what is couple?”

“Gray cow,” answers Dotty, very gravely.

“So when the cows saw us coming, they—­they—­O, they threw up their heads, and stopped eating grass—­in the air.  I mean—­threw—­up—­their heads.”  Susy was nearly asleep.

“Up in the air?”

“Yes, of course, up in the air. (There, I will wake up!) And the gray cow began to run towards us, and Grace says to me, ’O, my, she thinks you’re a pumpkin!’”

“You?”

“Yes, me, because my dress was so yellow.  I was just as afraid of the cow as I could be.”

“Good cow! He wouldn’t hurt!”

“No, the cow was good, and didn’t think I was a pumpkin, not the least speck.  But I was so afraid, that I crept under the bars, and ran home.”

“To grandma’s house?”

“Yes; and grandma laughed.”

“Well, where was me?” was the next question, after a pause.

Then, when the duty of story-telling was performed, Susy would gladly have gone back to “climbing the dream-tree;” but no, she must still listen to Dotty, though she answered her questions in an absent-minded way, like a person “hunting for a forgotten dream.”

One morning she was going to ride with her cousin Percy.  It had been some time since she had seen Wings, except in the stable, where she visited him every day.