When Ann went upstairs to make the bed that Tuesday morning, the sight
that met her eyes struck terror to her heart. The bedclothes were
scattered in wild confusion half over the room. The washbowl, with two
long singing-books across it, she discovered to her horror, was serving
as a prison for a small green snake. The Bible and the remaining hymn
books, topped by "Baxter's Saints' Rest," lay in a suspicious-looking
pile on the floor. Under these Miss Wetherby did not look. After her
experience with the snake and the washbowl, her nerves were not strong
enough. She recoiled in dismay, also, from the sight of two yellow,
paper-covered books on the table, flaunting shamelessly the titles:
"Jack; the Pirate of Red Island," and "Haunted by a Headless Ghost."

She made the bed as rapidly as possible, with many a backward glance at
the book-covered washbowl, then she went downstairs and shook and
brushed herself with little nervous shudders.

Ann Wetherby never forgot that Fourth of July, nor, for that matter,
the days that immediately followed. She went about with both ears
stuffed with cotton, and eyes that were ever on the alert for all
manner of creeping, crawling things in which Bobby's soul delighted.

The boy, reinforced by the children of the entire neighborhood, held a
circus in Miss Wetherby's wood-shed, and instituted a Wild Indian Camp
in her attic. The poor woman was quite powerless, and remonstrated all
in vain. The boy was so cheerfully good-tempered under her sharpest
words that the victory was easily his.

But on Saturday when Miss Wetherby, returning from a neighbor's, found
two cats, four dogs, and two toads tied to her parlor chairs, together
with three cages containing respectively a canary, a parrot, and a
squirrel (collected from obliging households), she rebelled in earnest
and summoned Bobby to her side.

"Robert, I've stood all I'm a-goin' ter. You've got to go home Monday.
Do you hear?"

"Oh, come off, Miss Wetherby, 't ain't only a menag'ry, an' you don't
use the room none."

Miss Wetherby's mouth worked convulsively.

"Robert!" she gasped, as soon as she could find her voice, "I never,
never heard of such dreadful goin's-on! You certainly can't stay here
no longer," she continued sternly, resolutely trying to combat the
fatal weakness that always overcame her when the boy lifted those
soulful eyes to her face. "Now take them horrid critters out of the
parlor this minute. Y