One day after Posy was quite well, she sat by the roadside near the house, moulding doll’s furniture out of clay. A little soft chair about as big as a grasshopper stood drying on a board, and she was now making a sofa, and embroidering the sides with a pin.

“Look,” said Pollio, “see who’s coming!”

It was dear Mr. Littlefield on horseback, stopping every now and then to pick a fly off his sleek horse. The children could not hear him; but he was saying to the horse,—

“There now, keep thy temper, good beast: I won’t let the flies bite thee.”

But he was too kind to kill the flies; and what do you suppose he did with them? Dropped them tenderly into his coat-pocket!

Before he reached Judge Pitcher’s the three children rushed out to meet him.

“Good-morning, Edward, and Napoleon and Josephine,” said he, as they alighted on him like a flock of birds. “Is thy mother well, and about the house? There now, I must hurry and let out my prisoners.”

The children followed him into the stable, where he opened his coat-pockets, and out jumped a handful of dizzy, crazy flies.

“I’ve kept them in jail, where they couldn’t do any mischief,” laughed the Quaker; “but now they can get an honest living in your stable, and not trouble anybody.”

Little Pollio and Posy laughed aloud at this, and, seizing their tender-hearted old friend by the arms, led him into the house through the kitchen. Eliza looked up very pleasantly, for she knew Friend Littlefield and liked him; but she was in the act of doing something which made him unhappy. Some flies had settled on the table to sip a few drops of molasses, and she was pouncing down on them with a wet towel.

“Eliza, Eliza,” said he sorrowfully, “those are God’s creatures. Consider! Thee can’t make a fly!”

“And I’m sure I shouldn’t want to,” said Eliza, with another dash of the towel. “I’m sorry you feel so, sir; but I’ve no notion of being turned out of the house by an army of flies.”

Mr. Littlefield sighed, and Pollio drew him along to the parlor. There were no flies there; and the room was so beautiful with pictures and flowers, that the good man smiled, and forgot Eliza’s cruelty. He took Posy on his knee, and talked to her mother about the dreadful accident to the steamboat, and thanked God again and again that the little girl was saved.

“How did thee feel when the boat blew up, Napoleon?”

“I thought I was a gone man,” replied Pollio; “and, I tell you, I tried hard to keep the children still.”

This was so droll, that everybody laughed. By and by the Quaker told Mrs. Pitcher he had come to Rosewood to take home a new “chaise,” and he had just happened to think that this would be a good time for the twins to pay him a visit. He could take them as well as not, and his wife Liddy was sure to be glad to see them.

Pollio began to turn a somerset, but caught himself by the hair, and changed it into a dance. Posy was quite as eager, but did not dance with any thing but her eyes.

“Wait a moment,” said their mamma. “Mr. Littlefield is very kind to give this invitation; but the truth is, my poor little Posy has nothing fit to wear. The cow has eaten up her two best dresses.”

The Quaker looked surprised, as well he might. He knew that toads eat their own clothes, but he had never heard that any animals eat little girls’ dresses.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pitcher, “our new cow strayed into the clothes-yard last Monday, and chewed up some of the fine clothes lying in a tub. We would not have bought such a strange cow if we had known her habits.”

“O mamma!” pleaded Posy in a whisper. “Don’t you s’pose the lady would ’scuse it? My other dresses are not very homely,—not so homely as Hop-clover’s.”

“Hop-clover!” exclaimed Pollio aloud. “Why, when the cow has chewed Posy’s things all up, they look better’n Hop-clover’s. Hop-clover’s things are all rags.”

“Is Hop-clover the cow?” asked the Quaker.

“Oh, no, sir! It’s a little girl. And that isn’t her name, either. Her name is—What is her name, mamma?”

“Lucinda Outhouse.”

“Oh, yes! I knew ’twas a shed, or some kind of a barn. Her name’s Lucy-vindy Outhouse.”

“Outhouse, Outhouse!” exclaimed the Quaker. “I never knew but one man of that name; and he married a good friend of mine,—Lucinda Fearing. But they went to Ohio. This can’t be Lucinda’s child.”

“Why, perhaps it is. We will send for Hop-clover, and you shall talk with her,” said Mrs. Pitcher, looking very much interested.

“How glad I should be if it is Lucinda’s child! Liddy and I thought so much of Lucinda!”

“She’s lame. Posy used to call her a hypocrite,” said Teddy. Whereupon Posy blushed, and hid behind her mother.

“Poor little girl! So she is lame? I’m sorry,” said the kind Quaker, looking sober, though he had never heard of Hop-clover before. He seemed to forget that he had invited company; and, without waiting to hear whether they could go or not, he kept on asking questions about the lame girl.

When he heard her mother was dead, he sighed, and said, “Poor thing, poor thing!” And, when he heard she lived alone with a bad step-father, he wiped his spectacles, as if this touched him far more than Eliza’s killing flies.

“Did thee say I could see the child?”

“Pollio!” said his mother.

Pollio was always ready to run for his hat, but just now he was lost in surprise. Were he and Posy to be cheated out of their visit? He started at once, however, to go after “Lucy-vindy.”

You never saw a worse looking house than the one she lived in. The windows were half glass, half rags: outside stood a tub, a rake with one or two stumpy teeth, an old mop, and a battered tin pail. Hop-clover was seated on the doorstep, mending the skirt of her dress with some blue cotton yarn drawn through a darning-needle. She had never been taught to sew, and was wearing her brass thimble on the wrong finger. Pollio did not know that; but he thought it was funny to use such a monstrous needle, and jerk so hard to get it through the calico.

“What you doing?” said he, leaning over to watch her.

“Oh! the holes are awful: I want to pucker ’em up a little,” replied Hop-clover, pulling with such a jerk that she scratched Pollio’s face.

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” said she. But it was a mercy she had not put out his eyes.

“Poh! it don’t hurt much: it isn’t as bad as a butcher-knife,” said he, spreading the blood over his cheek, as he rubbed the scratch with his finger. “But, Hop-clover, I want you to go to my house: there’s a man wants to see you.”

“Wants to see me!”

Hop-clover’s eyes were big with wonder.

“Yes. Come, hurry; for Posy and I are going to ride in his chaise,—I guess; and I never saw a chaise.”

“Well, wait, till I put on my good dress.”

“Oh, come along! Your dresses are all just alike.”

“Why, Pollio! I’ve got a pink one that’s most whole.”

And she hopped joyfully into the house to put it on. I suppose it had been pink when Edith Pitcher owned it; but Hop-clover had let it lie on the grass so many days and nights, that it was faded and spotted and streaked. Poor child! When people gave her any thing, she did not know how to take care of it.

Pollio thought she was a long while getting ready. He stood on the doorstone whistling, while she scrubbed her face and neck, and smoothed her hair with a comb which had about nine teeth in it. By the time she came out he was cross; but she did not know it. She was thinking how nice it was that somebody “wanted her,” somebody had “sent” for her.

The Quaker kissed her when he saw her. Perhaps she was cleaner and prettier than he had expected; for he kept saying, “Thee looks like a good little girl, a nice little girl. So thee has no mother? How long has she been dead?”

Hop-clover did not know; but Mrs. Pitcher said two years. She did not live very long after the family came to Rosewood.

“Where did thee move from when thee came here, my child?”

“We moved from Ohio.”

“This must be Lucinda Fearing’s child,” said Mr. Littlefield, rising and sitting down again. “Does thee remember how thy mother looked, my dear?”

“She had black curls. Oh, I remember her so well! She used to say thee and thou to me sometimes, just as you do.”

“Ah! that was our Lucinda! I’m so glad I have found her little girl!” said the Quaker, walking about the room, then stooping to kiss Hop-clover again.

“How would thee like to ride with me to my house this afternoon for a visit?”

Hop-clover looked at the carpet as if a star had fallen out of the sky at her feet. She never once thought of her gown; though it had stains and grease-spots, and a hole under each arm. She forgot her leaky shoes, and her coarse old shawl. What did she care about her clothes if for once in her life she could take a ride out of town!

She threw back her hat with such a look of delight, that Nunky drew a hasty picture of her, as he stood in the door with sketch-book and pencil in his hand. Everybody was glad for Hop-clover—I mean everybody but the twins.

“I tell you it’s mean,” said the injured Pollio to his injured sister, as they stole out of the room, and stood in the front-hall, with their arms around each other’s waists, “asking her to go instead of us!”

“So I think! If the cow did eat up my white dresses, how did he know I wasn’t a-going to go in my blue dress that the cow didn’t eat!”

“That’s so, Posy! And how’d he know I wouldn’t go? Mamma never said ‘no’ about that; for the cow didn’t eat up my clothes, ’cept my handkerjiff with ships in the corner.”

The good Quaker would have been quite surprised if he had overheard these remarks, for he had no idea of leaving his little pets behind. What he called his “chaise” was a large, handsome carriage with two seats; and, when the children were snuggled into it that afternoon, Pollio declared there was room enough for three more and the dog.

The serene old Quaker chirruped to his serene old horse, while the children shouted “Good-by, everybody!” and jumped up and down to try the new velvet cushions. And then the gay little party drove off.

Hop-clover wore Edith’s outgrown blue cambric dress, tucked up and taken in, and Posy’s second-best hat, and looked as respectable as any child in town.

“I’m so glad I’m lame!” thought she; “for that’s what makes everybody love me.”

Was it? Then why didn’t people love Jake Flint, a lying, stealing little boy in Rosewood, who was as lame twice over as Hop-clover?