e had been
sitting and started down this road as if sure it was the best way to go;
and Dorothy and Toto followed him.

Dorothy Meets Button-bright

[Illustration]

The seventh road was a good road, and curved this way and that--winding
through green meadows and fields covered with daisies and buttercups and
past groups of shady trees. There were no houses of any sort to be seen,
and for some distance they met with no living creature at all.

Dorothy began to fear they were getting a good way from the
_farm-house_, since here everything was strange to her; but it would do
no good at all to go back where the other roads all met, because the
next one they chose might lead her just as far from home.

She kept on beside the shaggy man, who whistled cheerful tunes to
beguile the journey, until by-and-by they followed a turn in the road
and saw before them a big chestnut tree making a shady spot over the
highway. In the shade sat a little boy dressed in sailor clothes, who
was digging a hole in the earth with a bit of wood. He must have been
digging some time, because the hole was already big enough to drop a
foot-ball into.

Dorothy and Toto and the shaggy man came to a halt before the little
boy, who kept on digging in a sober and persistent fashion.

"Who are you?" asked the girl.

He looked up at her calmly. His face was round and chubby and his eyes
were big, blue, and earnest.

"I'm Button-Bright," said he.

"But what's you real name?" she inquired.

"Button-Bright."

"That isn't a really-truly name!" she exclaimed.

"Isn't it?" he asked, still digging.

"'Course not. It's just a--a thing to call you by. You must have a
name."

"Must I?"

"To be sure. What does your mamma call you?"

He paused in his digging and tried to think.

"Papa always said I was bright as a button; so mamma always called me
Button-Bright," he said.

"What is your papa's name?"

"Just Papa."

"What else?"

"Don't know."

"Never mind," said the shaggy man, smiling. "We'll call the boy
Button-Bright, as his mamma does. That name is as good as any, and
better than some."

Dorothy watched the boy dig.

"Where do you live?" she asked.

"Don't know," was the reply.

"How did you come here?"

"Don't know," he said again.

"Don't you know where you came from?"

"No," said he.

"Why, he must be lost," she said to the shaggy man. She turned to the
boy once more.

"What are you going to do?" she inquire