CHAPTER V.
THE MAJOR'S JOKE.
While Dotty was dressing next morning, she fell to thinking again of her own importance as a young lady travelling _almost_ all alone by herself; and then it occurred to her that Jennie Vance, the judge's daughter, had never been any farther than Boston.
"When she comes to Portland next winter to see her aunties that live there, then I'll talk to her all about my travelling out West.

But I needn't tell her how that baby choked, nor how that naughty Dollyphus made fun of me.

No, indeed!" As she spoke she was pouring water into the wash-bowl; but her indignation towards Mrs.Lovejoy and "Dollyphus" made her hand unsteady; the pitcher came suddenly against the edge of the bowl, whereupon its nose and part of its body flew off into space.

Dotty held the handle, and looked at the ruins in astonishment.
"Did _I_ do that ?" She had no time to spend in lamentation.
"I don't want to let my papa know what I've done," thought she, giving the last hasty touches to her toilet: "he'll have to go and pay the man that keeps house; and then I'm afraid he'll think, if his little girl keeps choking folks and breaking things, I ought to stay at home." But Dotty was too well grounded in the "white truth" to hesitate long.
She could not hide the accident and be happy.

When she mentioned it to her father, he did not say, as some fathers might have done,-- "You careless child! Your sister _Prudy_ didn't break a pitcher or lose a pair of gloves all the way to Indiana." He and Mrs.Parlin were both afraid that, if they spoke in this manner, their children might infer that carelessness is just as sinful as falsehood and ill temper; they wished them to know there is a vast difference.