ver, grasped
again by his peculiarly unattractive tail and borne triumphantly to the
grassy bank behind the house, where, like any domestic animal, he was
tethered to a tree.

"What next?" asked Joy-of-Life, who was already losing her heart to the
unresponsive monster.

"Water," pronounced Sir Oracle. "Turtles won't feed except under water.
They can't swallow if their heads aren't completely immersed. It will
take your largest dishpan----"

"It's mesilf that is going home to-morrow--to stay," announced Mary.

"Wouldn't a washtub do?" compromised Joy-of-Life. "There's that old
one, you know, Mary, that you never use."

"First-rate. Show me where to find it, Mary. I'll give you a start to
that wild cherry."

With a craft beyond the semblance of his open countenance, Young
Audubon raced Mary to the cellar, where she arrived panting too hard
for protests. They soon returned in amicable companionship, carrying a
battered blue tub between them.

Jerking up Emilius by the cord, we plumped him into the tub, poured in
abundant water and left him to be happy. Then our troubles began.

In the first place, Emilius absolutely refused to eat, in water or out.
Understanding from our one authority that he needed a carnivorous diet,
we tempted him, day after day, with every variety of meat brought to
our door in the butcher's white-hooded cart with its retinue of hungry
dogs, but nothing whatever would our boarder touch. And in the second
place, he was, unlike Diogenes, forever scrambling out of his tub and
digging himself in at one point or another on the bank. Several times a
day one or the other of us might be seen tugging up Emilius by his cord
from the bowels of the earth and solicitously dumping him down again
into his tub of water, which a shovelful of mud, shreds of meat and
other attractions still failed to render homelike. His one object in
life was to get out of it.

"If Emilius would only take a nap!" I sighed one warm afternoon, when I
had just rescued him from a deep pit of his frenzied digging for the
third time that day.

"Read him poetry," advised Joy-of-Life. Magical snatches of Bliss
Carman's deep-sea songs ran through my head:--

"When sheering down to the Line
Come polar tides from the North,
Thy silver folk of the brine
Must glimmer and forth;"

* * * * *

"The myriad fins are moving,
The marvelous flanges play."

Chesterton, who chuckled over another