t to borrow some yeast, and Mr.
Edwards, who had a headache, was lying down in the chamber
immediately above Jim's den.

Mr. Peaslee stood and gazed. He eyed in turn the kitchen ell, the
shed, and the barn, and then gazed out over the "posy" garden, where
still bloomed a few late flowers, of which he recognized only the
"chiny" asters. He looked toward what he himself would have called
the "sarce" garden, with its cabbages, turnips, rustling
corn-stalks, and drying tomato-vines. Seeing no one there, he sent
his gaze to the distant rows of apple trees, bright with ripening
fruit. Disappointed, he was about to turn away, but he could not
resist taking a complacent, sweeping view of his own adjoining
possessions.

There, on the right, ran the long line of his own dwelling,
continued by the five-foot board fence separating his garden from
Mr. Edwards's. This stood up gauntly white until near the orchard,
where it was completely hidden by the high, feathery stalks of the
asparagus-bed, by a row of great sunflowers, now heavy and bent with
their disk-like seed-pods, and by a clump of lilac bushes. As his
eye traveled along the white expanse, he gave a quick start, and his
face clouded with vexation.

There in the sun, prone upon the top of the fence, dozed the bane of
his life--_the Calico Cat_.

Her coat was made up of patches of yellow and white, varied with
a black stocking on her right hind leg, and a large, round, black
spot about her right eye, which gave her a peculiarly predatory and
disreputable appearance. Solomon had disliked her at sight. Ever
since he had bought the house in Ellmington he had been trying to
drive her from the premises, but stay away she would not. Not all
the missiles in existence could convince her that his house was not
a desirable place of abode. And she was a constant vexation and
annoyance.

She jumped from the fence plump into the middle of newly planted
flower-beds; she filled the haymow with kittens; she asked all her
friends to the barn, where she gave elaborate musical parties at
hours more fashionably late than were tolerated in Ellmington.
Whenever she had indigestion she ate off the tops of the choicest
green things that grew in the garden; but when her appetite was good
she caught and devoured his young chickens.

Moreover, when at bay she frightened him. Once he had cornered the
spitting creature in a stall. Claws out, tail big, fur all on end,
she had leaped straight at