rdinary, plain, little bits of letters! Each capital
was topped off with an arrow, and ended with a feather, and even the
small letters had a thick blanket of dots.

The first entry was as follows:

April 7th.--_I wocked out to Crane's, and got 2 fantales. they are hard
to ketch. I payed 25 scents. My father knailed a box on the stable, and
I put in a bed of straw, they are bootiful. my sister would not let me
have her vale, but I got one prettier. they look woozy_.

The next day, Sunday, Philip did not see how he could go to church or
Sunday-school--he had not time, he said, but his mother agreed to watch
the pigeons, and so his religious obligations did not need to be set
aside.

Monday afternoon the Browns' back yard was full of little boys
inspecting Philip's pigeons, not merely idle onlookers, but hard-headed
poultry fanciers, as shown by the following entry:

April 9th.--_I sold a pare of white ones to-day to Wilfred Garbett, to
be kept three weeks after birth, Eva Gayton wants a pare too any color,
in July. She paid for them_.

Under this entry, which was made laboriously in ink, there was another
one, in lead pencil, done by Philip's brother, Jack:

_This is called selling Pigeons short_.

Philip's friends recommended many and varied things for the pigeons to
eat, and he did his best to supply them all, as far as his slender
means allowed; he went to the elevator for wheat; he traded his good
jack-knife for two mouse-eaten and anaemic heads of squaw-corn, which
were highly recommended by an unscrupulous young Shylock, who had just
come to town and was short of a jack-knife. His handkerchief,
scribblers and pencils mysteriously disappeared, but other articles
came in their place: a small round mirror advertising corsets on the
back (Gordon Smith said pigeons liked a looking-glass--it made them
more contented to stay at home); a small swing out of a birdcage, which
was duly put in place (vendor Miss Edie Beal, owner unknown). Of
course, it was too small for pigeons, but there were going to be little
ones very soon, weren't there?

He also brought to them one day five sunflower seeds, recommended and
sold by a mild-eyed little Murphy girl, who had the stubby fingers of a
money-maker. Philip, being very low in funds that day, wanted her to
accept prospective eggs in payment, but the stubby-fingered Miss Murphy
preferred currency! Philip decided to make no entry of these
transactions in his Pigeon Book.