alone
so much. This baby doesn't know how to nibble grass yet and you'll have
to get mamma to show you how to bring him up."

[Illustration]

Maude was delighted with her present. Her mother took a baby's
nurse-bottle and filled it with sweet new milk and in a very short time
Lambkin could take, through the rubber tube, all the milk his kind
friends would give him.

Maude and her pet made a pretty picture playing together in the meadow.

Nora, who worked in the kitchen, used to sing an odd little song, some
of the words being,

"Little lamb, little lamb,
Will you leave your old dam
And sit with me by the nursery fire?
You shall have bread and milk,
And a cushion of silk,
And a cradle as soft as a lamb could desire.

"No! no, little child
I'd rather run wild
And play all the day by the side of my dam;
For we love one another
Like you and your mother
And she'd cry all the day for the loss of her lamb."

TROTTY'S LESSON.

"Now try to learn this, Trotty. Of course, you're little and don't know
much, but when folks ask you how old your brother is you can just say 'a
whole hand old!'"

[Illustration]

"What for buver?"

"Well, it's because I'm just five years old! You won't have to learn to
count yet, but you take a short path and say 'a whole hand old!' Now
will you do it?"

"I will try!"

RUTH.

"Company coming to-morrow and not a crumb of cake in the house!" said
Mrs. Brown one morning. "Jane's gone and there's all the sweeping to do,
the baby to take care of, and three meals a day to get!"

[Illustration]

"Mother, mother dear," called Ruth from the next room, "do let me make
the cake. I should like nothing better. It would be great fun."

"Great fun! Now that is what one says who knows nothing about it. It
would be better to go without any cake at all than to place before our
friends some that they cannot eat," replied the tired mother.

"When I was at Aunt Fanny's," said Ruth, "she taught me how to make a
kind of cake that we all liked. Uncle John said he could eat all I could
make. Do let me try, mother dear."

"Oh, Ruth, what a tease you are. Well, it will keep you quiet for a
while and I suppose you must learn somehow."

Then Ruth ran into the kitchen in high glee. First she looked at the
fire in the stove as Aunt Fanny had taught her to do. More coal was
needed. So she had to go down cellar and bring up as much as she could
in