ittle Zay this morning. Mary,
the good old cook, who had been in the house years before Zay was born,
had actually refused to let her make any more mud-pies on her kitchen
window; and mamma and grandma had sided with the enemy.

Zay was a little dumpling of a girl, with hard round cheeks like red
apples, fat dimpled arms, and such wide-open eyes, and she looked very
funny now as she drew herself up to her fullest height, which was not
much of a height after all, brushed off her pretty blue dress, shook
down her clean ruffled apron, and addressed us all in very solemn
tones:

"I jes' want to tell you, I've been _resulted_, and I am never going to
live here anymore! I'll go 'way; clear off in the woods! And then I
guess you'll all be sorry! Mary need never make any more scrambled eggs
for breakfast, cause" (she almost broke down at the bare thought of so
direful a catastrophe), "cause there'll never be any chil'en to eat 'em
anymore! And _then_ I guess grandpa will be sorry when he comes home
tired, and doesn't have his s'ippers all yeddy!"

"O," said her mamma, gravely, "you are going right off, are you, before
dinner?"

"Yes, wight st'ait away, _now_! I'll go get my hat."

Down stairs the quick feet pattered to the hall-closet where the little
sun hat hung, always ready for the garden. Soon she was back, and held
her chin up with great composure for grandma to tie the strings.

The dear grandmother quietly laid her fine sewing down beside her on the
sofa. "_Is_ my little girl going away off by herself in the woods?"

"Yes, miles and _mileses_!"

"And what will you do when you get hungry?"

"Why, I'm going to take all my money," forthwith going to a drawer in
the old-fashioned book-case, and taking out a diminutive porte-monnaie,
which contained her whole fortune, three silver three-cent pieces, and
hanging it on her fat little hand, "and I can go to some g'ocery in the
woods, and buy lots of butter crackers."

I, sitting in an easy chair, just recovered from a long illness,
suggested, "But, Zay, you might want something besides crackers. I know
a little girl who is very fond of 'drum-sticks' and 'wish-bones'!"

"I can eat bears and wolves. I can make gravy, and," she added, "I'm
going to take grandpa's gun wif me."

"Very well," answered her mamma, going to grandfather's closet and
bringing out the gun, which was twice as large as the child.

There she stood before us--a little blue-eyed girl with a demur