the
garden-hose and the lawn-mower.

Naturally, no sensible person dreamed of connecting that illustrious
crest with the unfortunate and notorious Rena Magsworth whose name had
grown week by week into larger and larger type upon the front pages of
newspapers, owing to the gradually increasing public and official belief
that she had poisoned a family of eight. However, the statement that no
sensible person could have connected the Magsworth Bitts family with the
arsenical Rena takes no account of Penrod Schofield.

Penrod never missed a murder, a hanging or an electrocution in the
newspapers; he knew almost as much about Rena Magsworth as her jurymen
did, though they sat in a court-room two hundred miles away, and he had
it in mind--so frank he was--to ask Roderick Magsworth Bitts, Junior, if
the murderess happened to be a relative.

The present encounter, being merely one of apathetic greeting, did not
afford the opportunity. Penrod took off his cap, and Roderick, seated
between his mother and one of his grown-up sisters, nodded sluggishly,
but neither Mrs. Magsworth Bitts nor her daughter acknowledged the
salutation of the boy in the yard. They disapproved of him as a
person of little consequence, and that little, bad. Snubbed, Penrod
thoughtfully restored his cap to his head. A boy can be cut as
effectually as a man, and this one was chilled to a low temperature. He
wondered if they despised him because they had seen a last fragment of
doughnut in his hand; then he thought that perhaps it was Duke who had
disgraced him. Duke was certainly no fashionable looking dog.

The resilient spirits of youth, however, presently revived, and
discovering a spider upon one knee and a beetle simultaneously upon the
other, Penrod forgot Mrs. Roderick Magsworth Bitts in the course of
some experiments infringing upon the domain of Doctor Carrel. Penrod's
efforts--with the aid of a pin--to effect a transference of living
organism were unsuccessful; but he convinced himself forever that a
spider cannot walk with a beetle's legs. Della then enhanced zoological
interest by depositing upon the back porch a large rat-trap from the
cellar, the prison of four live rats awaiting execution.

Penrod at once took possession, retiring to the empty stable, where
he installed the rats in a small wooden box with a sheet of broken
window-glass--held down by a brickbat--over the top. Thus the symptoms
of their agitation, when the box was shaken or