transferring the word at the house gate to Mammy Juliet's grandson,
Pete.

But when one's evil star is in the ascendent, precautions are like the
vain strugglings of the fly in the web. The day of reckoning may be
postponed, but it will by no means be effaced from the calendar. One
purple and russet afternoon, when all the silent forest world was
steeped in the deep peace of early autumn, Thomas Jefferson was fishing
luxuriously in the most distant of the upper pools. There were three fat
perch gill-strung on a forked withe under the overhanging bank, and a
fourth was rising to the bait, when the peaceful stillness was rudely
rent by a crashing in the undergrowth, and a great dog, of a breed
hitherto unknown to Paradise, bounded into the little glade to stand
glaring at the fisherman, his teeth bared and his back hairs bristling.

Now Thomas Jefferson in his thirteenth year was as well able to defend
himself as any clawed and toothed creature of the wood, and fear, the
fear of anything he could face and grapple with, was a thing unknown.
Propping his fishing pole so that no chance of a nibble might be lost in
the impending struggle, he got on his knees and picked out the exact
spot in the dog's neck where he would drive the bait knife home when
hostilities actual should begin.

"Oh, please! Don't you hurt my dog!" said a rather weak little voice out
of the rearward void.

But, gray eyes human, holding brown canine in an unwinking gaze: "You
come round here and call him off o' me."

"He is not wishing to hurt you, or anybody," said the voice. "Down,
Hector!"

The Great Dane passed from suspicious rigidity and threatening lip
twitchings to mighty and frivolous gambolings, and Thomas Jefferson got
up to give him room. A girl--_the_ girl, as some inner sense instantly
assured him--was trying to make the dog behave. So he had a chance to
look her over before the battle for sovereignty should begin.

There was a little shock of disdainful surprise to go with the first
glance. Somehow he had been expecting something very different;
something on the order of the Queen of Sheba--done small, of course--as
that personage was pictured in the family Bible; a girl, proud and
scornful, and possibly wearing a silk dress and satin shoes.

Instead, she was only a pale, tired baby in a brier-torn frock; a girl
whose bones showed brazenly at every angle, and whose only claim to a
second glance lay in her thick mop of reddish-brown