it's all covered over with the most lucivicious
looking viands you ever see in your life, including a ham and a couple
of chickens and a pie and some cool-looking bottles with long necks on
'em and gilt-foil crowns upon their regal heads. And a couple of
flunkies in long-tailed coats and knee breeches and white wigs are
mooning round, fixing things up ship shape. And just then a tall lady
comes sauntering out of the bushes, and she strolls up close and the
flunkies bow and fall back and she says something about everything being
now ready for Lady Gwyndolin's garden party and departs the same way she
came. And the second she's out of sight, me and Sweet Caps can't hold in
no longer. We busts through the roadside thicket and tear acrost that
open place, licketty-split. It seems too good to be true. And it is.
When we gets up close we realizes the horrible truth.

"The ham is wood and the chickens is pasteboard and the pie is a prop
pie and the bottles aint got nothing in 'em but the corks. As we pauses,
stupefied with disappointment, a cheerful voice calls out: 'That's the
ticket! Hold the spot and register grief--we can work the scene in and
it'll be a knock-out!'

"And right over yonder at the other side of the clearing stands a guy in
a checked suit grinding the handle of a moving-picture machine. We has
inadvertently busted right into the drammer. So we kicks over his table
and departs on the run, with a whole troupe of them cheap fillum
troopers chasing after us, calling hard names and throwing sticks and
rocks and things.

"After while, by superior footwork, we loses 'em and resumes our
journey. Well, unless you've got a morbid mind you wont be interested in
hearing about our continued sufferings. I will merely state that by the
time five o'clock comes we have traveled upwards of nine hundred miles,
running sometimes but mostly walking, and my feet is so full of water
blisters I've got riparian rights. Nearly everything has happened to us
except something to eat. So we comes to the edge of a green field
alongside the road and I falls in a heap, and Sweet Caps he falls in
another heap alongside of me, making two heaps in all.

"'Kiddo,' I says, 'let us recline here and enjoy the beauties of
Nature,' I says.

"'Dern the beauties of Nature!' says Sweet Caps. 'I've had enough Nature
since this morning to last me eleven thousand years. Nature,' he says,
'has been overdone, anyway.'

"'Ain't you got no soul?' I sa