was not really Bunch; that is, she was not christened so. At
school she answered "Present" at roll-call to the prettier name of
Florence; but uncle Tim--he's such a jolly fellow!--said, when he
first held her in her delicately-embroidered blankets, that she was
such a bouncer, so red and so dumpy, that she would never be anything
but a bunch; and so dubbed, she carries the name to this day. But did
not she disappoint him, though! for, in some unaccountable way, she
daily stretched long, and flattened out, and became thin and bony. Her
collar-bone grew to be a perfect shelf, and her stockings got a very
awkward fashion of wrinkling about her ankles.

Soon after, when Tiny's little red face began to screw and squint at
uncle Tim, she was such a mite that he was sure to be right this time
if he nicknamed her Tiny; and she was so little, that an ordinary
pillow made her a bed of a comfortable size; and all the old cronies
in the village whispered that the new baby would either die off pretty
quick, or live to be a second Mrs. Tom Thumb. But Tiny lived, and
spited them, and waxed fat and bunchy, while Bunch astonished them all
by waning lean and tiny.

Jelly's name came no one knew how. Some mischievous sprite probably
whispered it to her; for she persisted that it was her name; and so
she was indulged in it.

Near their home was a vacant lot--vacant, excepting for a one-story
shanty, with a cellar, piles of broken crockery, old shoes, dislocated
hoop skirts, and bushes of rank stramoniums, with their big, poisonous
blossoms. Cows strayed in the lot, munching the ugly snarls of grass,
and the neighbors' pigs and fowls made a daily promenade through the
wilderness of refuse.

Although it seemed a very unattractive place for a neat little girl to
visit, now especially, since a pipe of the great sewer had overflowed,
and had deluged parts of the ground. But to that miserable shanty
mamma believed her little Bunch to have strayed; and there Tiny found
her, seated on a log of wood in the corner of the largest room, with
her apron thrown over her face and the Midgett girls--there were two
of them--first staring at her, and then winking at each other.

"Bunch," said Tiny, "Bunch, mamma says to hurry right straight home;
and guess what there is for dinner. Chicken pot-pie, and it's my turn
to have the wish-bone! Why, Bunch, what's the matter with you? What a
baby! You're always forever a-crying about something or other. Come o