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brought Cis--she had had her own mother's word for it many times before
that mother died. A stork had brought Johnnie, too--and Grandpa, Mrs.
Kukor, the Prince of Wales, the janitress; in fact, every one.

"I wonder what kind of a stork was it that fetched _Big Tom_!" Johnnie
once had exclaimed, straightway visioning a black and forbidding bird.

Storks, according to Cis, were as bashful as they were clever, and did
not come into sight if any one was watching. They were big enough to be
seen easily, however, as proven by this: frequently one of them came
floating down with twins!

"Down from where?" Johnnie had wanted to know, liking to have his
knowledge definite.

"From their nests, silly," Cis had returned. But had been forced to
confess that she did not know where storks built their nests. "In
Central Park, I guess," she had added. (Central Park was as good a place
as any.)

"Oh, you guess!" Johnnie had returned, disgusted.

He had never given up his watching, nor his hope of some day seeing a
big baby-bringer. He searched his sky patch now. But could see only the
darting sparrows and, farther away, some larger birds that wheeled
gracefully above the city. Many of these were seagulls. The others were
pigeons, and Cis had told him that people ate them. This fact hurt him,
and he tried not to think about it, but only of their flight. He envied
them their freedom in the vast milkiness, their power to penetrate it.
Beyond the large birds, and surely as far away as the sun ever was, some
great, puffy clouds of a blinding white were shouldering one another as
they sailed northward.

Out of the wisdom possessed by one of her advanced age, Cis had told him
several astonishing things about this field of sky. What Barber
considered a troublesome, meddlesome, wasteful school law was, at
bottom, responsible for her knowing much that was true and considerable
which Johnnie held was not. And one of her unbelievable statements (this
from his standpoint) was to the effect that his sky patch was constantly
changing,--yes, as frequently as every minute--because the earth was
steadily moving. And she had added the horrifying declaration that this
movement was in the nature of _a spin_, so that, at night, the whole of
New York City, including skyscrapers, bridges, water, streets, vehicles
and population, _was upside down in the air_!

"Aw, it ain't so!" he cried, though Cis reminded him (and rather
sternly, for her) that i