The story
“Dottie was very proud of her great big beautiful doll, but even the best of dolls are like plungers in Wall Street—sometimes they are in danger of getting broke. And that is what nearly happened to ‘Beautiful Bess’ and it nearly broke her mother’s tiny heart. The accident happened while Dottie and her nurse were in the park. Nurse had gone away for a moment with another nurse, and Dottie was all alone with the wreck of her child. There was no one to comfort her, and she wept bitterly. Suddenly she noticed another go-cart near her, and saw that it contained a beautiful doll, and one that was not broken. It had real hair and could gurgle, and kicked about in a funny way that was most delightful, in fact, a much more desirable play fellow than ‘Beautiful Bess.’
“So being a child who always took what she wanted when she wanted, Dottie threw ‘Beautiful Bess’ into the shrubbery, and put the new doll into her buggy, carefully covering her up so that the nurse would not notice the substitution. Gladly she welcomed the return of her nurse, and gleefully she went home, for she wanted to be alone with her new doll. Sitting alone at supper in her nursery, it suddenly struck her that perhaps ‘new dolly’ might be able to eat, for she seemed so accomplished. She started her in on cocoa, and managed to spill it all over them both. Dismayed, she rushed from her bedroom where the new doll was, to the nursery, where the nurse returned in time to see her, showed anger at her condition, removed her apron, and put it in the soiled clothes basket. Dottie was a kind mistress, and she realized that if she needed clean clothes, ‘New Dolly’ was in the same condition. So she took advantage of being unwatched to try to remove ‘new dolly’s’ clothes, failed and finally dumped Dolly and all into the basket. It struck her that immediate sanitary measures were needed (although she did not use those exact words) so she promptly dragged the basket off, knowing where the laundry was, as she had been there with her nurse.
“She arrived just in time to save a poor Chinaman from being dragged away to a cell. It was an honest, hard working Chinaman (there are many of them, by the way), but his partner was a thief and had been sentenced for stealing a watch, and the judge who presided had reason to fear that the criminal’s Tong was after him. So when the judge’s baby mysteriously disappeared, and the good Chinaman was seen in the neighborhood at the time, he naturally was suspected. They were just preparing work all the police degrees in full form on the unhappy Wu when Dottie arrived with her dirty doll that needed to be washed. The judge and his wife took the new doll away from Dottie, for it was their baby, and Dottie returned home disconsolate. The graceful Chinaman cheered her up, however, by promising to get her a doll with a pigtail from the Flowery Kingdom. All the time she regrets the animated toy that she had for a short time, so short, in fact, that it did not have the opportunity to be troublesome.”
Summary from The Moving Picture World · 1 June 1912
