n form, and though often sticky, not sufficiently so to be
adhesive.

--That picnic was so pleasant--or would have been but for Bloomer's
anxiety that I should behave myself, and Tuck's anxiety that I should
not--that I determined to have another all by myself--and I have had it.

I traveled to the same little dell I described before, and I put my feet
in the water just as I wasn't allowed to do the other day. And I built a
fire and almost cooked an egg and ate cake (an egg is the bud of a bird,
and cake is edible poetry) sitting on a fence.--Fences grow horizontally
and have no leaves.--Don't ask so many questions!

After a while, however, I became tired of being alone, so I started off
across some beautiful green meadows toward a hillside, where I had
observed a human walking about and waving a forked wand. He proved the
strangest-looking being I have met with yet, more like those wild and
woolly space-dwellers who tumbled out when that tramp comet bumped
against our second moon. But he was a considerate person, for when he
saw me coming and divined that I should be tired, he piled up a quantity
of delicious-scented herbage for me to sit on.

"Good morning, mister," I said, plumping myself down upon the mound he
had made, and he, being much more impressionable than you would suppose
from his Uranian appearance, replied:

"I swan, I like your cheek."

"It's a pleasant day," I said, because one is always expected to
announce some result of observation of the atmosphere. It shows at once
whether or not one is an idiot.

"I call it pretty danged hot," he returned, intelligently.

"Then why don't you get out of the sun?" I suggested, more to keep the
conversation fluid than because I cared a bit.

"I'm a-goin' to," he answered, "just as soon as that goll-darned wagon
comes." (A "goll-darned" wagon is, I think, a wagon without springs.)

"What are you going to do then?" I asked, beginning to fear I should be
left alone again after all my trouble.

"Goin' home to dinner," he replied, and I at once said I would go with
him.--You see, I had placed a little too much reliance on the egg.

"I dunno about that, but I guess it will be all right," he urged,
hospitably, and presently the goll-darned wagon arrived with another
man, who turned out to be the first one's son and who looked as though
he bit.

Together the two threw all the herbage into the wagon till it was heaped
far above their heads.

"How am I ever to