elope; but the words
were "TO DOROTHY," as plain as possible.

"What a very strange thing!" she said to herself, taking up the letter
and turning it over several times rather distrustfully. "I don't think
it looks very nice, but it may be something important, and I s'pose I
ought to read it"; and saying this, she opened the letter. It was
printed in funny little letters something like bird-tracks, and this was
what was in it:

We are in a bad fix. The fix is a cage. We have been seezed in a
outburst of ungovernerubble fury by Bob Scarlet. He says there's
been too many robbin pies. He goes on, and says he is going to have
a girl pie. With gravy. We shreeked out that we wasn't girls. Only
disgized and tuff as anything. He says with a kurdling laff we'll
do. O save us. We wish we was home. There is no male and we send
this by a noble rat. He is a female.

THE CARAVAN.

"Now, _that's_ the most ridiculous letter I ever got," said Dorothy,
gazing at it in blank astonishment; "and I don't _think_ it's spelled
very well either," she added rather doubtfully as she read it again;
"but of course I must go and help the poor little creatures. I ought to
feel frightened, but I really feel as brave as an ox. I s'pose _that's_
because I'm going to help the unfortunate"; and putting the letter in
her pocket, she started off.

"It's perfectly surprising," she said to herself as she ran along, "the
mischief they get into! They're really no more fit to be going about
alone than so many infants"; and she was so pleased with herself for
saying this that she began to feel quite large and bold. "But it was
very clever of 'em to think of the rat," she went on, "and of course
_that_ accounts for the sugar. No one but a rat would ever have thought
of using sugar for paper-weights. If I wasn't afraid of a rat I'd wish
it hadn't gone away, though, for I haven't the slightest idea where the
Caravan is, or which way I ought to go."

But it presently appeared that the noble rat had arranged the whole
matter for her; for as Dorothy ran along she began to find lumps of
sugar set up at intervals like little mile-stones, so that she shouldn't
miss the road.

"It's precisely like Hop-o'-my-thumb and his little crumbs of bread,"
she said, laughing to herself when she saw these, "only better, because,
you see, the birds can't carry them off."

The rat, however, seemed to have had a very roundabout idea of a r