vage dog,
And we both ran away."

[Illustration]

"Oh, ho! So that's the way it was, eh?" asked Buddy, who had never
heard that song before.

"That's exactly how it was, and not a bit different, I give you my word
for it," said Bawly, the frog. "But what have you there, Buddy?
Peppermint candy, as sure as I can sing! May I have a bit?"

"You could have it if it was candy," promised Buddy, real politely,
"only it isn't," and he looked at the queer red thing from all sides,
and he couldn't make out what it was, and neither could Bawly.

Well, I'll tell you what it was, so you can understand the story better.
It was a firecracker. Yes, sir, a big, red firecracker that, somehow or
other, hadn't gone off on Fourth of July when it ought to have done so.

I presume some boy had lighted it, tossed it into the bushes and it had
gone out and stayed out until Buddy found it. At any rate, he didn't
know what it was, and he took it home. Neither did Mr. Pigg know what it
was, but Buddy's mother and sister thought it was quite a pretty
ornament, and Mrs. Pigg put it on the parlor mantle, where company could
see it.

Well, one day, not long after this, Dr. Pigg was home all alone, for his
wife and the children had gone to a moving-picture show. He was dozing
away in his easy chair, with a newspaper over his face to keep away the
flies, when, all of a sudden, there came a knock on the door.

"My goodness alive! Who's there?" cried Dr. Pigg.

"It's me," answered a voice.

"And who, pray tell, may you be?" asked Dr. Pigg.

"I'm a bad tramp fox," was the answer, "and I want you to give me
something to eat. Quick! I'm in a hurry!"

Now that wasn't a nice way to speak, and Dr. Pigg knew it, and, what is
more, that bad fox knew it, too. But, do you s'pose he cared? Not a bit
of it. He was as impolite as he could be, and he took pride in it.

"I want something to eat in a hurry," he went on, in a coarse, grumbly
voice, and he was such a big fox, and Dr. Pigg was such a nice, gentle
kind of a creature that he didn't dare refuse him.

"Very well," said Buddy's papa, "step into the parlor, Mr. Fox, and I'll
see what I can do for you. There ought to be something in the pantry."

So he went to look in the pantry for a bone, or something like that,
just as Mother Hubbard would have done, you know, and when the fox went
in the parlor what do you suppose he saw? Why, that big, red firecracker
on the mantle, of course. And when h