d with this sally of his wit that he chuckled a
little and went to lie down on his bed.

There was bread-baking that afternoon, and there was a fire lighted
in the brick oven behind the house, and Tant Sannie had left the great
wooden-elbowed chair in which she passed her life, and waddled out to
look at it. Not far off was Waldo, who, having thrown a pail of food
into the pigsty, now leaned over the sod wall looking at the pigs. Half
of the sty was dry, but the lower half was a pool of mud, on the edge of
which the mother sow lay with closed eyes, her ten little ones sucking;
the father pig, knee-deep in the mud, stood running his snout into a
rotten pumpkin and wriggling his curled tail.

Waldo wondered dreamily as he stared why they were pleasant to look at.
Taken singly they were not beautiful; taken together they were. Was
it not because there was a certain harmony about them? The old sow was
suited to the little pigs, and the little pigs to their mother, the
old boar to the rotten pumpkin, and all to the mud. They suggested the
thought of nothing that should be added, of nothing that should be
taken away. And, he wondered on vaguely, was not that the secret of all
beauty, that you who look on-- So he stood dreaming, and leaned further
and further over the sod wall, and looked at the pigs.

All this time Bonaparte Blenkins was sloping down from the house in an
aimless sort of way; but he kept one eye fixed on the pigsty, and each
gyration brought him nearer to it. Waldo stood like a thing asleep when
Bonaparte came close up to him.

In old days, when a small boy, playing in an Irish street-gutter, he,
Bonaparte, had been familiarly known among his comrades under the title
of Tripping Ben; this, from the rare ease and dexterity with which,
by merely projecting his foot, he could precipitate any unfortunate
companion on to the crown of his head. Years had elapsed, and Tripping
Ben had become Bonaparte; but the old gift was in him still. He came
close to the pigsty. All the defunct memories of his boyhood returned on
him in a flood, as, with an adroit movement, he inserted his leg between
Waldo and the wall and sent him over into the pigsty.

The little pigs were startled at the strange intruder, and ran behind
their mother, who sniffed at him. Tant Sannie smote her hands together
and laughed; but Bonaparte was far from joining her. Lost in reverie, he
gazed at the distant horizon.

The sudden reversal of head a