“Bad news for you, Peggy,” cried she, as soon as she got home. “And bad news for you, Mary,” replied her sisters, who looked very sorrowful.
“What’s the matter?”
“Your poor goat is dead,” replied Peggy. “There she is, yonder, lying under the great corner stone; you can just see her leg. We cannot lift the stone from off her, it is so heavy. Betsy [one of the neighbour’s girls] says she remembers, when she came to us to work early this morning, she saw the goat rubbing itself, and butting with its horns against that old tottering chimney.”
“Many’s the time,” said Mary, “that I have driven the poor thing away from that place; I was always afraid she would shake that great ugly stone down upon her at last.”
The goat, who had long been the favourite of Mary and her sisters, was lamente
