"Her room was always in perfect order. Even her toys were never left
scattered about the house. She has her old doll packed away now, in
lavender, in nearly as good condition as when it was given to her,
sixty years ago. You can see how anything would annoy her that would
break in on these lifelong habits of hers. She was a child that took
great pleasure in her little keepsakes, and the longer she owned them
the dearer they became. She kept that little gold coin, that her
grandfather gave her, for over half a century; and that is the dollar
that Dago lost. Do you wonder that she grieved over the loss of it?
"The old blue china dragon is one of her earliest recollections. It
used to sit on a cabinet in her grandmother's room, and there were
always sugar-plums in it, as there have been ever since it was given
to her. I can remember it myself when I was a boy. One of the
pleasures of my visit to the old house was listening in the firelight
to grandfather's 'dragon tales,' as we called them. They were about
all sorts of wonderful things, and we called them that because, while
he told them, the old dragon was always passed around and we sat and
munched sugar-plums. That jar has been in the family so long that your
great-great-grandfather remembered it when he was a boy,--and that is
the jar that Dago broke.
"There were very few children in the neighbourhood where your Aunt
Patricia lived.
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