Rivers!" he
said, airily. "You have brought us something which we lacked in our
singularly peaceful beginning. Without romance, sir, no community is
complete. I have found you a felicitous disputant whom I shall miss; for
you leave me to provide the arguments on both sides of a subject on the
same evening. Our people have found you a neighbor of infinite resources
of humor and cheer. We wish you a pleasant trail. We wish you warm
sunshine when the weather is chill and shade when the weather is hot, and
that you shall ever travel with a singing heart, while old age never
overtakes the fancy of youth."

Every one of the familiar faces grouped around the fine, cultured old
face of the Doge expressed the thoughts to which he had given form.

"May your arguments be as thick as fireflies, O Doge!" Jack answered,
"everyone bearing a torch to illumine the outer darkness of ignorance!
May every happy thought I have for Little Rivers spring up in a
date-tree wonderful! Then, before the year is out, you will have a
forest of date-trees stretching from foothills to foothills, across the
whole valley."

"And one more about the giant with the little voice and the dwarf with
the big voice and the cat with the stripes down her back!" cried Belvy
Smith, spokeswoman for the children. "Are they just going on forever
having adventures and us never knowing about them?"

"No. I have been holding back the last story," Jack said. "Both the giant
and the dwarf were getting old, as you all know, and they were pretty
badly battered up from their continual warfare. Why, the scar which the
giant got on his forehead in their last battle was so big that if the
dwarf had had it there would have been no top left to his head. After the
cat had lost that precious black tip to her tail she became more and more
thoughtful. She made up her mind to retire and reform and have a
permanent home. And you know what a gift she had for planning out things
and how clever she was about getting her own way. Now she sat in a hedge
corner thinking and thinking and looking at the stubby end of her tail,
and suddenly she cried, 'Eureka!' And what do you think she did? She went
to a paint shop and had her left ear painted yellow and her right ear
painted green. So, now you can see her any day sunning herself on the
steps of the cottage where the giant and the dwarf live in peace.
Whenever they have an inclination to quarrel she jumps between them and
wiggles the yellow