an
air--or Heaven knows what--let slip flickering lights and shadows to
play over that cast-iron face, until the child, looking down upon it
with the quick, transforming power of love, thought that it smiled.

The two remaining members of the family were less distinctive.
"Gloriana"--pronounced as two words: "Glory Anna"--being the work of
her father, who also named it, was simply a cylindrical roll of canvas
wagon-covering, girt so as to define a neck and waist, with a rudely
inked face--altogether a weak, pitiable, manlike invention; and "Johnny
Dear," alleged to be the representative of John Doremus, a young
storekeeper who occasionally supplied Mary with gratuitous sweets. Mary
never admitted this, and as we were all gentlemen along that road,
we were blind to the suggestion. "Johnny Dear" was originally a small
plaster phrenological cast of a head and bust, begged from some shop
window in the county town, with a body clearly constructed by Mary
herself. It was an ominous fact that it was always dressed as a BOY,
and was distinctly the most HUMAN-looking of all her progeny. Indeed,
in spite of the faculties that were legibly printed all over its smooth,
white, hairless head, it was appallingly lifelike. Left sometimes by
Mary astride of the branch of a wayside tree, horsemen had been known to
dismount hurriedly and examine it, returning with a mystified smile, and
it was on record that Yuba Bill had once pulled up the Pioneer Coach
at the request of curious and imploring passengers, and then grimly
installed "Johnny Dear" beside him on the box seat, publicly delivering
him to Mary at Big Bend, to her wide-eyed confusion and the first blush
we had ever seen on her round, chubby, sunburnt cheeks. It may seem
strange that with her great popularity and her well-known maternal
instincts, she had not been kept fully supplied with proper and more
conventional dolls; but it was soon recognized that she did not care
for them--left their waxen faces, rolling eyes, and abundant hair in
ditches, or stripped them to help clothe the more extravagant creatures
of her fancy. So it came that "Johnny Dear's" strictly classical profile
looked out from under a girl's fashionable straw sailor hat, to the
utter obliteration of his prominent intellectual faculties; the Amplach
twins wore bonnets on their ninepins heads, and even an attempt was
made to fit a flaxen scalp on the iron-headed Misery. But her dolls were
always a creation of he