This continued until the head and shoulders were much too small for even its reduced frame, and all the devices of childish millinery--a shawl secured with tacks and well hammered in, and a hat which tilted backward and forward and never appeared at the same angle--failed to restore symmetry.

Until one dreadful morning, after an imprudent bath, the whole upper structure disappeared, leaving two hideous iron prongs standing erect from the spinal column.

Even an imaginative child like Mary could not accept this sort of thing as a head.

Later in the day Jack Roper, the blacksmith at the "Crossing," was concerned at the plaintive appearance before his forge of a little girl clad in a bright-blue pinafore of the same color as her eyes, carrying her monstrous offspring in her arms.

Jack recognized her and instantly divined the situation.
"You haven't," he suggested kindly, "got another head at home--suthin' left over," Mary shook her head sadly; even her prolific maternity was not equal to the creation of children in detail.