oosey, then you won't want any
thing to play with," said Mally, hurrying away.

"I'm _not_ a goosey," shouted Dick after her. Ten minutes later, as she
was tying her bonnet strings, she heard him calling from the top of the
stairs.

"What is it, Dickie?"

"I'm not a goose. Goosies has feathers. They say 'quack.'"

"You're the kind that hasn't feathers and doesn't say quack," replied
Mally from below. "No, darling, you're not a goose; you're Mally's good
boy. Now, run back to bed."

"Yes, I will," replied Dick, satisfied by this concession. He climbed
into bed again, and lay watching the pink patch on the wall. Yellow bars
began to appear and to dance in the midst of the pink.

"Like teeny-weeney little ladders," thought Dick. There was a ladder
outside his door, at top of which was a scuttle opening on to the roof.
Dickie turned his head to look at the ladder. The scuttle-door stood
open; from above, the pink light streamed in and lay on the rungs of the
ladder.

"I did go up that ladder once," soliloquized Dick. "Papa took me. It was
velly nice up there. I wiss Papa would take me again. Mally, she said it
was dangewous. I wonder why she said it was dangewous? Mally's a very
funny girl, I think. She didn't ought to put me to bed so early. I can't
go to sleep at all. Perhaps I sha'n't ever go to sleep, not till
morning,--then she'd feel sorry.

"If I was a bird I could climb little bits of ladders like that," was
his next reflection. "Or a fly. I'd like to be a fly, and eat sugar, and
say b-u-z-z-z all day long. Only then perhaps some little boy would get
me into the corner of the window and squeeze me all up tight with his
fum." Dickie cast a rueful look at his own guilty thumb as he thought
this. "I wouldn't like that! But I'd like very much indeed to buzz and
tickle Mally's nose when she was twying to sew. She'd slap and slap,
and not hit me, and I'd buzz and tickle. How I'd laugh! But perhaps
flies don't know how to laugh, only just to buzz.

"'Pretty, curious, buzzy fly.'

That's what my book says."

The pink glow was all gone now, and Dick shifted his position.

"I _wiss_ I could go to sleep," he thought. "It isn't nice at all to be
up here and not have any playthings. Mally's gone, else she'd get me
something to amoose myself with. I'd like my dwum best. It's under the
hall table, I guess. P'waps if I went down I could get it."

As this idea crossed his mind, Dickie popped quickl