ted for Pryors' and
went straight ahead, only I kept out of line with our kitchen windows.
I tramped through the slush, ice, and crossed fields where I was afraid
of horses; but when I got to the top of the Pryor backyard fence, I
stuck there, for the bulldogs were loose, and came raving at me. I was
going to be eaten alive, for I didn't know the word Laddie did; and
those dogs climbed a fence like a person; I saw them the time Leon
brought back Even So. I was thinking what a pity it was, after every
one had grown accustomed to me, and had begun loving me, that I should
be wasted for dog feed, when Mr. Pryor came to the door, and called
them; they didn't mind, so he came to the fence, and crossest you ever
heard, every bit as bad as the dogs, he cried: "Whose brat are you,
and what are you doing here?"

I meant to tell him; but you must have a minute after a thing like that.

"God of my life!" he fairly frothed. "What did anybody send a dumb
child here for?"

"Dumb child!" I didn't care if Mr. Pryor did wear a Crown of Glory.
It wasn't going to do him one particle of good, unless he was found in
the way of the Lord. "Dumb child!" I was no more dumb than he was,
until his bulldogs scared me so my heart got all tangled up with my
stomach, my lungs, and my liver. That made me mad, and there was
nothing that would help me to loosen up and talk fast, like losing my
temper. I wondered what kind of a father he had. If he'd been stood
against the wall and made to recite, "Speak gently," as often as all of
us, perhaps he'd have remembered the verse that says:

"Speak gently to the little child;
Its love be sure to gain;
Teach it in accents soft and mild;
It may not long remain."

I should think not, if it had any chance at all to get away! I was so
angry by that time I meant to tell him what I thought. Polite or not
polite, I'd take a switching if I had to, but I wasn't going to stand
that.

"You haven't got any God in your life," I reminded him, "and no one
sent me here. I came to see the Princess, because I'm in awful trouble
and I hoped maybe she could fix up a way to help me."

"Ye Gods!" he cried. He would stick to calling on God, whether he
believed in Him or not. "If it isn't Nimrod! I didn't recognize you
in all that bundling."

Probably he didn't know it, but Nimrod was from the Bible too! By
bundling, he meant my hood and coat. He helped me from the fence, sent
the bulldogs rol