CHAPTER IV 27
It had not been the custom that Mistress Mary should do anything but stand and allow herself to be dressed like a doll, but before she was ready for breakfast she began to suspect that her life at Misselthwaite Manor would end by teaching her a number of things quite new to her--things such as putting on her own shoes and stockings, and picking up things she let fall. If Martha had been a well-trained fine young lady ' s maid she would have been more subservient and respectful and would have known that it was her business to brush hair, and button boots, and pick things up and lay them away. She was, however, only an untrained Yorkshire rustic who had been brought up in a moorland cottage with a swarm of little brothers and sisters who had never dreamed of doing anything but waiting on themselves and on the younger ones who were either babies in arms or just learning to totter about and tumble over things.
If Mary Lennox had been a child who was ready to be amused she would perhaps have laughed at Martha ' s readiness to talk, but Mary only listened to her coldly and wondered at her freedom of manner. At first she was not at all interested, but gradually, as the girl rattled on in her good-tempered, homely way, Mary began to notice what she was saying.
" Eh! you should see ' em all," she said. " There ' s twelve of us an ' my father only gets sixteen shilling a week. I can tell you my mother ' s put to it to get porridge for ' em all. They tumble about on th ' moor an ' play there all day an ' mother says th ' air of th ' moor fattens ' em. She says she believes they eat th ' grass same as th ' wild ponies do. Our Dickon, he ' s twelve years old and he ' s got a young pony he calls his own."
" Where did he get it?" asked Mary.
" He found it on th ' moor with its mother when it was a little one an ' he began to make friends with it an ' give it bits o ' bread an ' pluck young grass for it. And it got to like him so it follows him about an ' it lets him get on its back. Dickon ' s a kind lad an ' animals likes him."
Mary had never possessed an animal pet of her own and had always thought she should like one. So she began to feel a slight interest in Dickon,