soon as she finds them," Hamish declared.

He did not dream that they were already found and bestowed in a safe
nook in a crevice between the chinking where they would not be again
discovered in a hurry, for he had earlier expressed his determination to
forsake the gentility of long hair in emulation of sundry young wights,
the roaring blades of single men about the settlement.

Odalie was too tactful to remonstrate. "And oh!" she exclaimed with a
sort of ecstasy. "My pouncet-box! how sweet! _delicieux!_" She presented
the gold filigree at the noses successively of Hamish and Fifine and the
cat, all of whom sniffed in polite ecstasy, but Kitty suddenly wiped her
nose with her paw several times and then began to wash her face.

"My poppet! my poppet!" cried Fifine, ecstatically, as a quaint and tiny
wooden doll of a somewhat Dutch build and with both arms stretched out
straight was fished out. She snuggled it up to her lips in rapture, then
showed it to the cat, who evidently recognized it, and as it was danced
seductively before her on the buffalo rug, put out her paw and with a
delicate tentative gesture and intent brow was about to play with it
after her fashion of toying with a mouse, when one of her claws caught
in a mesh of the doll's bobinet skirt. Now the doll's finery, while
limited in compass to minuteness, was very fine, and as Josephine's
short shriek of indignation, "_Quelle barbarie!_" arose on the air, the
cat turned around carrying the splendidly arrayed poppet off on her
unwilling claw--to be lost, who knew where, in the wilderness! The
frantic little owner seized the tail of the _mignonne toute cherie_,
which sent up a wail of poignant discordance; the romping Hamish, with a
wicked mimicry of the infantile babbling cry, "_Quelle barbarie!_"
impeded the progress of Fifine by catching the skirt of her little
jacket, called a josie; whereupon Odalie, imitating his dislocated
French accent and boyish hoarseness in the exclamation, "_Quelle
barbarie!_" laid hold upon his long curly hair, held together by a
ribbon as an apology for a pig-tail. There ensued an excited scramble
around on the buffalo rug before the fire, during which the horn was
turned over and some of its small treasures escaped amidst the long fur.
This brought Odalie to a pause, for the lost articles were buttons of
French gilt, and they must be found in the fur and counted; for did they
not belong to Sandy's best blue coat, and could not b