“Oh, there’s my dear old Clown friend!” thought the Rabbit, all wet as he was.  “How in the wide world did he get here?”

But of course he could not ask, any more than the Calico Clown could answer.

And when the Clown, lying on the grass where he had fallen from Sidney’s pocket, saw the Candy Rabbit, the Clown said to himself: 

“Yes, there he is!  The same one I knew before.  Oh, if we could only get together by ourselves and talk!  How much we could say!”

Sidney picked the Calico Clown up off the grass.

“Where did you get him?” asked Madeline again.  “He’s awfully cute.  I saw one like that in the store where Aunt Emma got my Candy Rabbit.”

“Maybe this is the same one,” Sidney answered.  “I traded off my musical top to Archibald for the Clown.  His leg is broken.”

“Whose—­Archibald’s?” asked Madeline, in surprise.

“No, the Clown’s,” answered Sidney, with a laugh.  “I’m going to fix it.  Course a Calico Clown is worth more than a musical top, for the Clown is new and my top was old.  But a Clown with a broken leg isn’t worth so much.”

“Is it worth anything?” asked Madeline.  “I mean can you fix him?”

“Oh, yes,” her brother answered.  “He can still bang his cymbals, and he can jiggle both his arms and the leg that isn’t broken.”

Sidney punched the Clown in the chest, and the red and yellow fellow clapped his hands together and made the cymbals tinkle.  Then Sidney pulled the strings and the two arms of the Clown went up and down, and one leg kicked out as nicely as you please.  But the other leg did not move.

“That’s the leg that’s broken,” Sidney explained.  “He got broken when Pete made him do the giant’s swing.”

“He looks as though he was trying to dance on one leg!” laughed Madeline.  “He’s awfully cute, but he’s funny!”

“I’ll soon fix him, and he’ll be as good as ever,” declared her brother.  “You’d better go and put your Rabbit in the sun to dry.”

So Madeline did this, and very glad the sweet chap was to feel the warm sun on his back, for he had been made quite drippy and sticky by having fallen into the fountain.

Sidney, as I have told you, was a boy who could mend things.  Once he had fixed Herbert’s toy boat that was broken, and, another time, he had glued a head back on Madeline’s Celluloid Doll.

“And I think I can glue my Clown’s broken leg,” thought Sidney, as he went toward the kitchen.  There, he remembered, the cook always kept a tube of sticky glue.

“What are you going to mend now?” asked the cook.

“A broken leg,” Sidney answered.

“Oh, you can’t mend a broken leg with glue!” cried the cook.  “You had much better call in the doctor.  Whose leg is it?”

“I’m going to be the toy doctor,” the little boy went on.  “It’s the wooden leg of a Calico Clown I’m going to mend.”

“Oh, that’s different,” said the cook.  “Well, here’s the glue.”