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The boy lifted his head and looked at the little girl, who suddenly hid her face in the papa’s other shoulder. “Well, I declare, papa, she was putting up her lip.”

“I wasn’t, any such thing!” said the little girl. “And I don’t care! So!” and then she sobbed.

“Now, never you mind,” said the papa to the boy. “You’ll be putting up your lip before I’m through. Well, and then she used to caution the little Pony Engine against getting in the way of the big locomotives, and told it to keep close round after her, and try to do all it could to learn about shifting empty cars. You see, she knew how ambitious the little Pony Engine was, and how it wasn’t contented a bit just to grow up in the pony-engine business, and be tied down to the depot all its days. Once she happened to tell it that if it was good and always did what it was bid, perhaps a cow-catcher would grow on it some day, and then it could be a passenger locomotive. Mammas have to promise all sorts of things, and she was almost distracted when she said that.”

“I don’t think she ought to have deceived it, papa,” said the boy. “But it ought to have known that if it was a Pony Engine to begin with, it never could have a cow-catcher.”

“Couldn’t it?” asked the little girl, gently.

“No; they’re kind of mooley.”

The little girl asked the papa, “What makes Pony Engines mooley?” for she did not choose to be told by her brother; he was only two years older than she was, anyway.

“Well; it’s pretty hard to say. You see, when a locomotive is first hatched–“

“Oh, are they hatched, papa?” asked the boy.

“Well, we’ll call it hatched,” said the papa; but they knew he was just funning. “They’re about the size of tea-kettles at first; and it’s a chance whether they will have cow-catchers or not. If they keep their spouts, they will; and if their spouts drop off, they won’t.”

“What makes the spout ever drop off?”

“Oh, sometimes the pip, or the gapes–“

The children both began to shake the papa, and he was glad enough to go on sensibly. “Well, anyway, the mother locomotive certainly oughtn’t to have deceived it. Still she had to say something, and perhaps the little Pony Engine was better employed watching its buffers with its head-light, to see whether its cow-catcher had begun to grow, than it would have been in listening to the stories of the old locomotives, and sometimes their swearing.”

“Do they swear, papa?” asked the little girl, somewhat shocked, and yet pleased.

“Well, I never heard them, near by. But it sounds a good deal like swearing when you hear them on the up-grade on our hill in the night. Where was I?”

“Swearing,” said the boy. “And please don’t go back, now, papa.”

“Well, I won’t. It’ll be as much as I can do to get through this story, without going over any of it again. Well, the thing that the little Pony Engine wanted to be, the most in this world, was the locomotive of the Pacific Express, that starts out every afternoon at three, you know. It intended to apply for the place as soon as its cow-catcher was grown, and it was always trying to attract the locomotive’s attention, backing and filling on the track alongside of the train; and once it raced it a little piece, and beat it, before the Express locomotive was under way, and almost got in front of it on a switch. My, but its mother was scared! She just yelled to it with her whistle; and that night she sent it to sleep without a particle of coal or water in its tender.

“But the little Pony Engine didn’t care. It had beaten the Pacific Express in a hundred yards, and what was to hinder it from beating it as long as it chose? The little Pony Engine could not get it out of its head. It was just like a boy who thinks he can whip a man.”