d driving the cows home to be milked.

Was ever such another Wonderland revealed to a child who had never been
in a toy-shop and never owned a doll that was not home-made?

I screamed and capered with joy, like the crazy thing I was, for a whole
minute after my eyes fell upon the mimic settlement. Then I fell to
examining the "entertainment" more closely, and discovered that
everything, except the mosses that imitated the trees, vines, and other
growing things, was made of corn-stalks and corn-husks--"shucks" as
Virginians call them. The human creatures and the dumb animals were
carved out of the firm, dried pith of the stalks, and afterward painted
with water colors. The clothes of men and women were made of the soft
inner shucks, dried carefully to the pliability of silk. Log and frame
houses were built of the canes themselves; the smallest were used whole,
the larger were split. Peeping into the open doors and windows I saw
that each house was furnished with beds, tables, and chairs, also made
of corn-stalks, pith, and shucks.

At the far end of the counter were six bird-cages, constructed of thin
strips of corn-canes, each supplied with perches and water vessels.

"Those are my reform prisons," Madam Leigh said to my cousins, who had
followed and begged to be let in. "You see,"--to me,--"when one of my
hummers becomes cross or quarrelsome, I separate him from the rest and
shut him up in one of these cages until he is in a better humor. I am
sorry to say that they have pretty peppery tempers, and hardly a day
passes in which I do not have to interfere to stop their fighting."

I had no reason to feel myself slighted now. She went all round the room
with me, showing her pets and telling me interesting stories of their
habits and dispositions. Each had a name, and some answered to their
names when she called them. At least, she thought that they did, and I
did not doubt it when I saw them swoop down to dip their bills in the
flowers she held up, as she called "Sprite" and "Bright," and "Sweet"
and "Swift," and the like crisp, short names in a voice that was like
the tinkle of a little bell. It was a pretty sight,--the tiny woman, all
white from cap to toe, standing in the full tide of sunbeams, bunches of
honeysuckle and catalpa flowers, half as big as herself, in her arms,
the elf-like face smiling out of them at the eagerness of her feathered
darlings, darting and glancing and gleaming and humming about her, as if