aring a noise on the back stairs, as if the house was falling, Mrs.
Hardway went to see what the trouble was, and opened the kitchen door just
in time to receive a full glass of lemonade squarely on the chest.

When the waitress stumbled, she fell on Zip, pinning him under her. In his
roll down the stairs, he had lost some of the candy, so that now his mouth
and nose were free, though he was minus a tooth and several of his long
smeller whiskers. Now he began to howl as if being killed. This brought
more of the guests to the spot, and you would have laughed could you have
seen their faces when first they peered into the kitchen, which looked as
if a cyclone had struck it.

A few feet from the door was the maid, sitting with limbs outspread, too
dazed to move, while from under the corner of her skirt rolled a big,
sticky ball of some kind that howled as it rolled. Beyond him was an
overturned hamper of soiled clothes, with stockings, collars, sheets and
petticoats spilling out of it. At the other end of the room stood Mrs.
Hardway, wiping the lemonade off her dress, while all over the place were
slices of lemon and pieces of fruit and Maraschino cherries. When all the
children came from upstairs, they told Mrs. Hardway how it had all come
about from Zip getting in their candy and their trying to wash it off his
coat.

As Zip was still in a ball and could not extricate himself, the same boy
who had carried him to the bathroom before, put the apron around him again
and took him back upstairs.

This time they got him in the tub safely and began to turn the water in.
The tub was slippery, and so was the candy, and as the water crept up to
where Zip was tied, not hand and foot, but worse still, head, nose, ears
and all four legs as well as tail, he howled and howled until one could
have heard him a block away. He was so afraid of being drowned before the
water would soak off the candy and when the children tried to pull it off
it nearly killed him with pain, for it took all the little fine hairs of
his coat with it.

The window of the bathroom was open and the doctor, coming out on his
front porch to look at the sky before retiring, heard Zip howling
somewhere across the street. He was crying in such a pitiful, frightened
manner that the doctor knew he must be fast somewhere or hurt so he could
not get home. Consequently he hurried across the street to see where his
pet was, with the worried Tabby close at his heels.

T