en to play with."

"But you haven't got a kitten," said Agatha, with a feminine desire for
stating the entire truth on most occasions.

"A stray one might come in at any moment," I replied.

Anyway, I didn't get the blotting-paper.

THE BLOOD-FEUD OF TOAD-WATER
A WEST-COUNTRY EPIC

The Cricks lived at Toad-Water; and in the same lonely upland spot Fate
had pitched the home of the Saunderses, and for miles around these two
dwellings there was never a neighbour or a chimney or even a
burying-ground to bring a sense of cheerful communion or social
intercourse. Nothing but fields and spinneys and barns, lanes and
waste-lands. Such was Toad-Water; and, even so, Toad-Water had its
history.

Thrust away in the benighted hinterland of a scattered market district,
it might have been supposed that these two detached items of the Great
Human Family would have leaned towards one another in a fellowship
begotten of kindred circumstances and a common isolation from the outer
world. And perhaps it had been so once, but the way of things had
brought it otherwise. Indeed, otherwise. Fate, which had linked the two
families in such unavoidable association of habitat, had ordained that
the Crick household should nourish and maintain among its earthly
possessions sundry head of domestic fowls, while to the Saunderses was
given a disposition towards the cultivation of garden crops. Herein lay
the material, ready to hand, for the coming of feud and ill-blood. For
the grudge between the man of herbs and the man of live stock is no new
thing; you will find traces of it in the fourth chapter of Genesis. And
one sunny afternoon in late spring-time the feud came--came, as such
things mostly do come, with seeming aimlessness and triviality. One of
the Crick hens, in obedience to the nomadic instincts of her kind,
wearied of her legitimate scratching-ground, and flew over the low wall
that divided the holdings of the neighbours. And there, on the yonder
side, with a hurried consciousness that her time and opportunities might
be limited, the misguided bird scratched and scraped and beaked and
delved in the soft yielding bed that had been prepared for the solace and
well-being of a colony of seedling onions. Little showers of earth-mould
and root-fibres went spraying before the hen and behind her, and every
minute the area of her operations widened. The onions suffered
considerably. Mrs. Saunders, sauntering at this luckles