m! He's got my Brownie!" He's in a frenzy,
and I don't blame him. It does make you mad to see your pet get hurt. I
run for a broom to try to poke Cat out, but it isn't any use. Meanwhile,
Ben finds Redskin safe in the box, and he scoops him back into the
lunchbox.

Finally, we move the bed, and there is Cat poking daintily with his paw at
Brownie. The salamander is dead. Ben grabs the broom and bashes Cat. Cat
hisses and skids down the hall. "That rotten cat! I wish I could kill him!
What'd you ever have him for?"

I tell Ben I'm sorry, and I get him a little box so he can bury Brownie.
You can't really blame Cat too much--that's just the way a cat is made, to
chase anything that wiggles and runs. Ben calms down after a while, and we
go back to the encyclopedia to finish looking up about the Red Eft.

"I don't think Brownie was really ready to lay eggs, or he would have been
in the pond already," I say. "Tell you what. We could go back some day
with a jar and try to catch one in the water."

That cheers Ben up some. He finishes taking notes for his report and
tracing a picture, and then he goes home with Redskin in the lunchbox. I
pull out the volume for C.

Cat. Family, _Felidae_, including lions and tigers. Species, _Felis
domesticus_. I start taking notes: "'The first civilized people to keep
cats were the Egyptians, thirteen centuries before Christ.... Fifty
million years earlier the ancestor of the cat family roamed the earth, and
he is the ancestor of all present-day carnivores. The Oligocene cats,
thirty million years ago, were already highly specialized, and the habits
and physical characteristics of cats have been fixed since then. This may
explain why house cats remain the most independent of pets, with many of
the instincts of their wild ancestors.'"

I call Ben up to read him this, and he says, "You and your lousy
carnivore! _My_ salamander is an amphibian, and amphibians are the
ancestors of _all_ the animals on earth, even you and your Cat, you sons
of toads!"

13

[Illustration: Dave and Mary in wind on boardwalk at beach.]

THE LEFT BANK OF CONEY ISLAND

Columbus Day comes up as cold as Christmas. I listen to the weather
forecast the night before, to see how it'll be for the beach. "High winds,
unseasonably low temperatures," the guy says. He would.

I