he stove-lid lifter on a
plate in the ice chest. Whatever became of the left-over pork chop
which should have been there he had no idea.

Babbie came dancing in at noon on her way home from school. She
found her Uncle Jed in a curious mood, a mood which seemed to be a
compound of absent-mindedness and silence broken by sudden fits of
song and hilarity. He was sitting by the bench when she entered
and was holding an oily rag in one hand and a piece of emery paper
in the other. He was looking neither at paper nor rag, nor at
anything else in particular so far as she could see, and he did not
notice her presence at all. Suddenly he began to rub the paper and
the rag together and to sing at the top of his voice:

"'He's my lily of the valley,
My bright and mornin' star;
He's the fairest of ten thousand to my soul--Hallelujah!
He's my di-dum-du-dum-di-dum--
Di--'"

Barbara burst out laughing. Mr. Winslow's hallelujah chorus
stopped in the middle and he turned.

"Eh?" he exclaimed, looking over his spectacles. "Oh, it's you!
Sakes alive, child, how do you get around so quiet? Haven't
borrowed the cat's feet to walk, on, have you?"

Babbie laughed again and replied that she guessed the cat wouldn't
lend her feet.

"She would want 'em herself, prob'ly, Uncle Jed," she added.
"Don't you think so?"

Jed appeared to consider.

"Well," he drawled, "she might, I presume likely, be as selfish and
unreasonable as all that. But then again she might . . . hum . . .
what was it the cat walked on in that story you and I was readin'
together a spell ago? That--er--Sure Enough story--you know. By
Kipling, 'twas."

"Oh, I know! It wasn't a Sure Enough story; it was a 'Just So'
story. And the name of it was 'The Cat Who Walked by His Wild
Lone.'"

Jed looked deeply disappointed. "Sho!" he sighed. "I thought
'twas on his wild lone he walked. I was thinkin' that maybe he'd
gone walkin' on that for a spell and had lent you his feet. . . .
Hum. . . . Dear, dear!

"'Oh, trust and obey,
For there's no other way
To be de-de-de-di-dum--
But to trust and obey.'"

Here he relapsed into another daydream. After waiting for a
moment, Babbie ventured to arouse him.

"Uncle Jed," she asked, "what were you doing with those things in
your hand--when I came in, you know? That cloth and that piece of
paper. You looked so funny, rubbing them together, that I coul