Adalina Patti was a doll of most trying disposition. You wouldn't
tell, when she woke up, what distracting thing she'd do first. I've
known her, when seated at the breakfast table, in her high chair, next
to Sirena, her little mamma, I have known her to jerk suddenly
forward, and plunge her face right into a plate of buttered cakes and
syrup.
This necessitated the removing of her from the table and a good deal
of cleansing and re-dressing on the part of Bidelia, the hired girl.
She had movable eyes; they were very lovely, but, if you'll believe
it, she'd screw them round, just to be contrary, so that she'd look
cross-eyed for hours together. No sweet persuasion or threat of
punishment could induce her to look like a doll in her right mind.
This was not quite so bad though, as the outlandish noises she made
when she didn't want to say "mamma," which she could do very
distinctly when she first arrived, at Christmas.
But a crisis in her petulant obstinacy came, when she wouldn't sit
still to have her hair combed, and it looked like a "hurrah's nest,"
her brother Bob said. All her naughtiness came right out then. She
rolled one eye entirely up in her head, and left it there, and stared
so wild with the other, that Sirena gave her a pretty lively shake,
but she only dropped that eye and rolled up the other.
This made her little mamma pause and meditate. She got provoked as she
looked at her, and then she gave her a double shake; then that bad
doll rolled up both her eyes, and nothing could induce her to get them
down again.
Oh, dear! How many dreadful things she looked like. There was a
vicious parrot in the park that made its eyes look just like Adalina's
did, just before it stuck its head through the bars of its cage to
bite people. And there was a stone lady, that was named "Ceres," on
one of the paths in the same park, and she kept her eyes rolled up all
the time, greatly to the terror of Sirena and Bidelia, who had to pass
her in coming home in the twilight. And down street there was a
tobacconist's sign that represented a fairy queen, with butterfly
wings, taking a pinch of snuff, and the weather had taken all the
paint off her eyes and she looked simply hideous; and Sirena grasped
Bidelia very tight, till they got round the corner. Now here was her
lovely French doll looking like them and cutting up worse. She'd go to
mamma with this trouble as she did with all others.
She put her doll down with her face against the carpet, and taking
hold of her pink kid arm, dragged her, not very gently, over the
carpet to her mother.
At that moment in bounced Rob, who, immediately taking in the
situation of affairs, exclaimed,--"Oh, don't be so cruel to Adalina!
Is she just horrid? You know, Rena, that's what you are, sometimes,
yourself. What's the matter any way? What makes you look so glum?"
"This doll is acting dreadful; just look at her eyes!" said Sirena.
"You can't tell any thing by any one's eyes, yours look like the 4th
of July, now, and you're a delightful little girl, everybody says; you
don't whack things round, and scream, when the flowers bloom in the
spring."
He was to be repressed immediately. Sirena looked at her mother.
"He wants to be funny, Sirena," said her mother, soothingly.
"Then he isn't funny; he's never funny," said Sirena, drawing herself
up with dignity.
"Totty Belmont says you're the teasenest, hatefulest boy she knows! So
there," remarked Sirena.
"Oh, ho! I don't wonder the doll is scared. Why don't you treat that
pretty creature with some consideration? Dragging her over the carpet,
and spoiling her pretty dress! Now you'll see, just as soon as she
comes to me, because I'm good-looking and nice, she'll put her eyes
down and smile at me as lovely as ever."
He took the doll and jumped it up and down in the air, dancing about
and singing, "Tra-la."
As sure as the world! Down came the eyes, and Adalina was her charming
self again.
"Now you see," said Rob, "if you want people to be good to you and
love you, you must not be rude and ill-natured yourself. This doll is
French, and particular, and she just won't look at cross little girls;
so there!"
"I think," said her mamma, "that Sirena will not get so angry with her
doll again. She looks as if she were ashamed of it now. However
disagreeable we may think people are, it's best to watch ourselves,
lest in finding fault with them, we fall into the same errors."
[Illustration: SIRENA.]