ome here--the top button of your
dress is unfastened." Jane submitted to the buttoning process then flew
off to tell the others, who were already setting up shop in the fence
corner.

"Oh, Jane," they chorused the moment she came in sight, "Mother gave us
the loveliest yellow satin and some pink flowers and lace, too!"

"Yes, and I found six chicken feathers that'll be grand for turbans,"
broke in Gertie.

Chicken Little flung herself breathless upon the grass and explained
between gasps.

"If it wasn't for that horrid practicing!" she finished.

"Never mind," said Katy, "Gertie can be fixing the store and I'll start
right in on a hat. It'll take a lot of work I tell you--we're going to
charge ten cents a hat."

Chicken Little started reluctantly back to the house and still more
reluctantly settled down on the old green-velvet piano stool to
practice. There was not much music in her soul, and sitting still at
anything was torture. She squirmed even when she read, and her brother
Frank said she got into sixty-nine different positions by actual count
during the sermon one Sunday. He had made her a standing offer of ten
cents whenever she could sit perfectly still for five minutes, but so
far his money was safe.

The moon-faced clock on the opposite wall ticked monotonously and
Chicken Little's small fingers thumped stiffly at the five-finger
exercises while she painfully counted aloud, partly to get the time and
partly for company.

At the end of ten minutes she looked up at the clock in despair--surely
it must have stopped! But no, the big pendulum was swinging faithfully
to and fro. She tried scales, then she went back to exercises. She
squirmed and wriggled and counted the big white medallions in the
crimson body-brussels carpet. These medallions were her especial
admiration, for each was bordered with elaborate curlicues, and
contained a gorgeous basket of woolen flowers, the like of which never
bloomed in any garden, temperate or tropical. There were fifteen of
these across the room and twenty-five lengthwise.

The lace curtains were floral, too. She occupied five minutes trying
for the hundredth time to decide, whether a delicate lace bloom with the
circumference of a holly-hock was intended for a lily or a rose. The old
steel engraving of General Washington's household hanging over the piano
helped on a few moments more. The colored servant back of the general's
chair had a fascination for her even grea