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             [Illustration: "Aunt Penelope's stories were
                             charming."--_Frontispiece._]



                                 THE

                          LAND OF LOST TOYS



                                  BY

                        JULIANA HORATIA EWING

          AUTHOR OF "JACKANAPES," "DADDY DARWIN'S DOVECOT,"
          "THE STORY OF A SHORT LIFE," "MARY'S MEADOW," ETC



                             Illustrated





                                BOSTON

                      LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY




                          _Copyright, 1900_,

                    BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

       *       *       *       *       *




THE LAND OF LOST TOYS


AN EARTHQUAKE IN THE NURSERY.

It was certainly an aggravated offence. It is generally understood in
families that "boys will be boys," but there is a limit to the
forbearance implied in the extenuating axiom. Master Sam was condemned
to the back nursery for the rest of the day.

He always had had the knack of breaking his own toys,--he not
unfrequently broke other people's; but accidents will happen, and his
twin sister and factotum, Dot, was long-suffering.

Dot was fat, resolute, hasty, and devotedly unselfish. When Sam
scalped her new doll, and fastened the glossy black curls to a wigwam
improvised with the curtains of the four-post bed in the best bedroom,
Dot was sorely tried. As her eyes passed from the crownless doll on
the floor to the floss-silk ringlets hanging from the bed-furniture,
her round rosy face grew rounder and rosier, and tears burst from her
eyes. But in a moment more she clenched her little fists, forced back
the tears, and gave vent to her favorite saying, "I don't care."

That sentence was Dot's bane and antidote; it was her vice and her
virtue. It was her standing consolation, and it brought her into all
her scrapes. It was her one panacea for all the ups and downs of her
life (and in the nursery where Sam developed his organ of
destructiveness there were ups and downs not a few); and it was the
form her naughtiness took when she was naughty.

"Don't care fell into a goose-pond, Miss Dot," said nurse, on one
occasion of the kind.

"I don't care if he did," said Miss Dot; and as nurse knew no further
feature of the goose-pond adventure which met this view of it, she
closed the subject by putting Dot into the corner.

In the strength of _Don't care_, and her love for Sam, Dot bore much
and long. Her dolls perished by ingenious but untimely deaths. Her
toys were put to purposes for which they were never intended, and
suffered accordingly. But Sam was penitent, and Dot was heroic.
Fiorinda's scalp was mended with a hot knitting-needle and a perpetual
bonnet, and Dot rescued her paint-brushes from the glue-pot, and smelt
her india-rubber as it boiled down in Sam's waterproof manufactory,
with long-suffering forbearance.

There are, however, as we have said, limits to everything. An
earthquake celebrated with the whole contents of the toy cupboard is
not to be borne.

The matter was this. Early one morning Sam announced that he had a
glorious project on hand. He was going to give a grand show and
entertainment, far surpassing all the nursery imitations of circuses,
conjurors, lectures on chemistry, and so forth, with which they had
ever amused themselves. He refused to