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faraway.
    “Oh, hurry, Tom! Do!” Hetty cried. “The poor thing’s dying of starvation!”
    “Oh, dear!” said little Minnie. “The poor, poor thing!”
    Tom and Warren and Caddie went out and dug away the banking from the open place in the foundation while Hetty and Minnie stood by and watched. But when the gap in the foundation rocks was laid bare, they all saw that it was a smaller hole than they had remembered. None of the three larger children could possibly have crawled in there; and certainly none of them wanted to, for the hole looked singularly dark and uninviting.
    “Let’s try putting some feed here, and calling
Chick! Chick!”
suggested Tom.
    But—whether from fright or weakness they could nottell—the poor lost chicken would not be lured into the open air. Vainly they coaxed and peered into the darkness, but only an occasional weak chirp told them that the chicken was still there. They could see nothing.
    “Maybe Hetty could get into the hole,” Caddie suggested, and Hetty tried.
    But she stuck fast and had to be pulled out with muddy pantalets and many cries of anguish.
    “I wonder about little Minnie,” Tom said doubtfully.
    Caddie shook her head, and Hetty cried, “It’s dreadful in there! Minnie would be afraid.”
    They all looked at little Minnie and she looked back at them with her round blue eyes, and then suddenly she surprised everyone by saying in her small, shy voice, “I can.”
    Little Minnie was a tight fit, but they managed to get her through the hole into the darkness.
    “Now don’t you be afraid, Minnie,” Hetty called anxiously. “There’s nothing in there to hurt you, honey. Don’t you be a bit afraid.”
    Little Minnie turned around and put her face out of the hole for a moment to console Hetty.
    “It’s all right, Hetty,” she said seriously. “Don’t you be afraid either, honey.”
    Little Minnie was gone for so long a time that even Tom began to be worried.
    “Golly! What would Ma say if we lost her?”
    “Well, maybe Katie Conroy would let us take up the kitchen floor for
Minnie,”
Caddie said.
    “Minnie! Are you all right?”
    “Yes,” replied little Minnie’s voice from far under the house, and presently, all covered with cobwebs and dirt, she came crawling out with a half-dead chicken in her arms.
    That was how Hetty and Minnie got their special pet.
    For a long time the chicken took not the slightest interest in life, but squatted dejectedly in the cotton-lined box which the little girls provided for a bed and pecked halfheartedly at their offerings of food and water. When he finally made up his mind that life was worth living after all, the snow had come and nobody had the heart to turn him out into the cold. Tom made him a little pen behind the woodbox; and when he was not in it he was riding around on Hetty’s or Minnie’s shoulder, or pulling their penny dolls in a little cardboard cart which Caddie constructed from a discarded box.
    “The girls have got all these pets,” Warren said. “Tom, we’d ought to have something, too.”
    “I know,” Tom said. “But what?”
    “Tadpoles,” Warren suggested, and added more thoughtfully, “Snakes, maybe.”
    But there is a singular lack of warmth and response in the affection of a tadpole or a snake.
    In February, when they went through the woods tapping the hard maple trees and hanging their buckets on pegs to catch the maple sap, they often saw the speckled sides or short white tails of the deer vanishing away through the hazel brush.
    “A deer, now—” Tom said.
“That
would be a pet if you could get one! Tadpoles and snakes—they wouldn’t be in it!”

    Riding around on Minnie’s shoulder
    But the boys were still looking for the ideal pet when spring came, and with it the shearing of the sheep.
    Caddie’s Bouncer was a year old that spring and had as fine a coat of wool as any animal in Father’s flock, which now numbered nearly seven hundred and fifty sheep. Caddie was looking