Eveline, Arabella, and Peg were having a great discussion, seated on a large cushion where their mistress had left them when she went to bed.

“It isn’t fair!” exclaimed Arabella, shaking herself. “Here I can scarcely bend because she has stuck a pin right through me. It goes in at my waist and out at my back, and the bit that sticks out at my back, she hung my sash on and thought it wonderful!”

“Yes, she treats our nice, soft bodies just like pin-cushions,” agreed Eveline. “And her mother has given her a nice work-basket with needles, scissors, and a thimble in, and plenty of tapes and buttons, and she is always trying to make her sew neatly, yet just look at us!”

“But what about me?” chimed in wooden Peg. “My master hasn’t a work-basket, and when he wanted to stick this piece of cloth on my head for a cap, he just got a tack and hammered it in! And there it will remain until he wants a tack again, and then he’ll know where to find it.”

“Well, of course your feelings are not so keen as ours,” sniffed Eveline. “I am not very big, but I have five pins in me, and one is to keep my stocking up, and she has tied a piece of cotton so tightly round the other that it’s cutting into my leg.”

“Well,” said Arabella, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. To-morrow when she picks us up we will make all these pins scratch her; we will scratch her so much that she will be glad to take them all out and put buttons on.”

The next day when Doris picked up Eveline she suddenly screamed, “Oh, mother, see how I have pricked myself on this nasty pin! Oh, it does hurt!”

Mother looked grave.

“If my little girl would try to sew as mother wants her to, there would be no nasty pins, dear.”

Doris thought a moment and then picked up Arabella. There was another cry, and a scratch on her wrist. “Oh, mother,” sobbed Doris, “they have hurt me all over. Now I won’t put any more pins in, I won’t really! I’ll start now and learn to sew, mother.”

So Doris put tapes on all her dollies’ clothes. Indeed, she even put tapes on Peg’s hat and tied it under her chin for her, and Jim was very glad, because he was wanting the tack.

Isabel Rayfield.