istles, apologetically whispering: "Sorry
not to be wishing your company, but Susan and Aunt Ca'line will look
after you. Ain't nothin' on God's earth that will keep Susan Barrows
from lookin' after every mortal thing she sets eyes on."

Without deigning a farewell, Moses trotted away. A ridiculous looking
animal with an ancestry as mixed as any son of Adam, yet he had an
enormous self-esteem. You see, though a dog, Moses possessed a
self-sustaining ego, which requires no special ancestry or talents to
uphold it. For there is a vanity that feeds itself, and many nobler
personalities go down before it. Invariably Ambrose's did. Merely
christened after the Hebrew lawmaker because of having been found amid
some bulrushes, yet Moses may have felt that the name carried its
anointment.

But now at last the traveller had fairly started. Swinging into his gig,
he arranged his long legs in a comfortable right-angle triangle, taking
a final hurried glance around him. "Move on, Liza, faster'n you can, or
it's all over with me," he urged, "for things is lookin' kind of
nervous."

Three times his wagon wheels had revolved in the clay road when a
shutter on the house next door banged open, and like the explosion of a
gun a child's voice rent the air.

"He's off! I tell you I see him. He's gettin' away unbeknownst." And a
thin, brown figure hopping out of the window on the grass ran toward the
street, twittering and moving its head from side to side like an excited
bird. An instant later from the same opening a second pair of legs
protruded--longer and thinner than the others, clad in white stockings
and black cloth gaiters. Like the feelers of a beetle turned over on its
back they waved in the air. And from behind a kind of barrel-shaped
opening came a voice so tragic and compelling that even old Liza,
stopping short, turned an inquiring eye toward the source of the
disturbance.

As for Ambrose, although filled with a boy's impatience at interruption,
the sight was overpowering. His reins dropped loosely, he stared,
gasped, and then shook with silent laughter. Susan Barrows was living in
the days of hoopskirts, and now in her effort to slide through the
window had been held fast.

Nevertheless, in her time, desire has probably removed as many mountains
as faith, so, notwithstanding her present difficulty, Susan's gave her
power soon to set herself upright on the ground, and still with her full
rigging to continue moving towar