which had held no dog for years, but was still carefully preserved and whitewashed every spring. Emily’s heart would have broken if anything had happened to Mike II.
“Old Kelly,” the tin pedlar, had given him to her. Old Kelly had come round through Blair Water every fortnight from May to November for thirty years, perched on the seat of a bright red pedlar’s wagon and behind a dusty, ambling, red pony of that peculiar gait and appearance pertaining to the ponies of country pedlars—a certain placid, unhasting leanness as of a nag that has encountered troubles of his own and has lived them down by sheer patience and staying power. From the bright red wagon proceeded a certain metallic rumbling and clinking as it bowled along, and two huge nests of tin pans on its flat, rope-encircled roof flashed back the sunlight so dazzlingly that Old Kelly seemed the beaming sun of a little planetary system all his own. A new broom, sticking up aggressively at each of the four corners gave the wagon a resemblance to a triumphal chariot. Emily hankered secretly for a ride in Old Kelly’s wagon. She thought it must be very delightful.
Old Kelly and she were great friends. She liked his red, clean-shaven face under his plug hat, his nice, twinkly, blue eyes, his brush of upstanding, sandy hair, and his comical pursed-up mouth, the shape of which was partly due to nature and partly to much whistling. He always had a little three-cornered paper bag of “lemon drops” for her, or a candy stick of many colours, which he smuggled into her pocket when Aunt Elizabeth wasn’t looking. And he never forgot to tell her that he supposed she’d soon be thinking of getting married—for Old Kelly thought that the surest way to please a female creature of any age was to tease her about getting married.
One day, instead of candy, he produced a plump grey kitten from the back drawer of his wagon and told her it was for her. Emily received the gift rapturously, but after Old Kelly had rattled and clattered away Aunt Eliz-
