MARY’S LITTLE LAMB 127 
miles; by that time the precious shirt had dwindled 
to something quite small—nothing in fact was 
left but the hard starched front, which the guanaco 
found it difficult to masticate and swallow. Then 
at long last the hunt was given up and my poor 
shirtless friend in his towel rode mournfully home 
in the midst of laughing companions, attended, too, 
by a lot of dogs, lolling their tongues out and over- 
flowingly happy at having had such an exciting run. 
Let me now come to the subject I sat down to 
write about—namely, Mary’s little lamb. It was 
little to begin with, when my youngest sister, who 
was not then very big herself, and was always 
befriending forlorn creatures, came in one day 
from the shepherd’s ranch with a young lamb 
which had unhappily lost its mother. Oddly 
enough this little sister’s name was Mary—one 
seldom hears it in these Doris, Doreen days, but 
in that distant Mary-Jane-Elizabeth period it was 
quite common. And the motherless lamb she had 
brought in grew to be her pet lamb, with fleece 
as white as snow; nor was the whiteness strange 
seeing that it was washed every day with scented 
soap, its beauteous neck beribboned and often 
decorated with garlands of scarlet verbenas which 
looked exceedingly brilliant against the snowy fleece. 
A pretty, sweet-tempered and gentle creature it 
proved and never developed any naughty proclivi- 
ties like the tobacco- and book-plundering sheep of 
an earlier date. They were very fond of each 
other, those two simple beings, and just as in the 
