CHAPTER XIII.

溪

THE DESERTER.

DOLLY awoke. The sun was shining.

very still. She raised herself in bed to

Everything was

look round her.

She did not know where she was. All was strange. It was such a tiny room. The curtains, and the bedclothes were clean, and very white. But it was so different to anything she had ever seen before.

She lifted up her head, to look around more clearly, and struck it against the top of her bedstead. Why, it was like a box, the bed she was in.

"How very funny!" thought the little girl. "And there is a round window, like the round looking-glass in the parlour at home. And what a low ceiling! If I stood on tiptoe I know I could touch it with my fingers. How odd it all is! Perhaps it is a dream."

She fell asleep again, while she was wondering; but in a little while she woke up with such a jump. Her bed was turning right over.

Before she could even utter an exclamation, it turned

on the other side, and then, righting itself, remained comfortably in its former position.

"Oh! dear, how very odd it all is!" said Dolly to herself, and after a few moments she said softly,

"Aunty."

“I am here, my dear," said a voice, just over her head; and, looking up, Dolly beheld her aunt's kind face looking down upon her. Just as though they were in a cupboard, and Aunt Charlotte was occupying a shelf, above that on which her niece was deposited, snugly tucked in, with sheets and blankets.

"Do you feel better, darling?" asked Aunt Charlotte, as she leaned over, and put her hand down to clasp that of her little niece.

"Yes, aunty, dear, I feel all right, I think. Have I been ill, then?"

"Don't talk now, my child," answered her aunt. "I am going to get up, and then we will talk."

So Aunt Charlotte came down from her strange bed, stepping lightly over Dolly's shelf on to the floor of the tiny bedroom; which really, thought the girl, was not much bigger than that in a large doll's house. Just as she was going to ask a question, the whole room tilted over; Aunt Charlotte's clothes went slipping right away, and if she had not held tight to the bedstead, where Dolly was, she would have gone after them. But the room came right again, and the clothes slid back.

All at once there was a great plash on the tiny