She had a pair of busy dimples, which were a constant delight to her sisters.

“They twinkle, twinkle like little stars, only they don’t shine,” cried Prudy.

“Why,” said Susy, “it’s just as if her cheeks were made of water, and we were skipping pebbles in ’em.”

And because of these tiny whirl pools, the child was usually called Dotty Dimple.  From the time she could stand on her own little feet, she was a queen of a baby, and carried her small head very high.  If she chanced to fall over a chair she seldom shed a tear, but thought the chair had treated her shamefully, and ought to be shut up in the closet.  She never liked to have any one kiss her little bruises and pity her.  It gave great offence if any one said, “Poor Alice!” She seemed to grow half a head taller in a minute, and looked as if she would say, “Needn’t make a baby o’ me!”

Not that she really said so.  Talking was a thing she did not often attempt, though she sang a great deal, with a voice as clear as a flute.  Prudy mourned because her tongue “did not grow fast enough.”  But where was the need of speech?  If she fancied she would like to be tossed to the “sky of the room,” she had only to pat her father’s arm, and point upward, and the next minute she was flying to the ceiling, in high glee, and catching her breath.  If she wished to go walking, it was enough to point to the door, and then to her hat.  Her little forefinger was as good as most people’s tongues, and served as a tolerably good guide-post, for it pointed the way she meant to go herself, and the way she wished others to go.

One day, while Mrs. Parlin was making currant jelly, she allowed Prudy to stay in the kitchen, and see her strain the beautiful crimson juice.  But as for Alice, she had been found pounding eggs in a mortar, and must be taken away.  She was placed in care of Susy, who led her out upon the piazza, where she could watch the people passing by. “Pedadder!” cried Alice, showing her dimples.  “Yes, piazza; so it is,” said careless Susy, beginning to read a fairy story, and soon forgetting her quiet little charge.

Looking up at last, there was nothing to be seen of Alice.  She could not have entered the house, for the front-door knob was above her reach.

Susy ran out upon the pavement, and looked up and down the street.  Which way to go she could not tell, but started down street at full speed.  “O, I’m sure I ought to be going up street,” gasped she; “and if I was, I shouldn’t think that was right either.  Wish I knew which way I should expect Dotty to go, and then I’d know she’d gone just the other way.”

After flitting hither and thither for some time, Susy ran home to give the alarm.  Without stopping to remove the jelly from the stove, Mrs. Parlin, Norah, and Prudy ran out of doors, and taking different directions, started in search of the missing child.