and the cave, where we all wanted to go for a while to
see Old Man Paddler. So we decided to leave Mr. Black out there by
himself at the bottom of Bumblebee hill until we came back later,
which we did.

"He ought to have a hat on," Dragonfly said. "He'll catch his death of
cold with his bald head."

"Or he might get stung on the head by a bumblebee," Circus said, and
Little Jim spoke up all of a sudden and said, like he was almost mad
at us, "Can anybody help it that he gets bald? My pop's beginning to
lose some of his hair on top...." Then he grabbed his stick which he
had leaned up against the beech tree for a jiffy, and struck very
fiercely at a tall brown mullein stalk that was standing there in a
little open space, and the seeds scattered in every direction, one of
them hitting me hard right on my freckled face just below my right
eye, and stung like everything; then Little Jim started running as
fast as he could go in the direction of the sycamore tree, like he had
been mad at us for something we'd done wrong. In fact, when he said
that, I felt a kind of a sickish feeling inside of me, like maybe I
_had_ done something wrong. I grabbed my stick and started off on the
run after Little Jim, calling out to the rest of the gang to hurry up,
and saying, "Last one to the sycamore tree is a cow's tail," and in a
jiffy we were running and jumping and diving around bushes and trees
and leaping over snow-covered brushpiles toward the old sycamore tree
and the mouth of the cave, which was there, and which as you know is a
very long cave, and comes out at the other end in the cellar of Old
Man Paddler's cabin.

3

Of course everybody knows about Old Man Paddler, the kindest old long
whiskered old man who ever lived, and who was the best friend the
Sugar Creek Gang ever had. He lived up in the hills above Sugar Creek,
and almost every week the gang went up to see him--sometimes in the
summer-time we went nearly every day. We went in the winter, too, on
account of he lived all by himself and we had to go up to take him
things which our moms were always cooking for him, and also we had to
be sure he didn't get sick 'cause there wouldn't be anybody there to
take care of him or call the doctor for him on account of he didn't
have any telephone....

After a little while we were tired of running so fast, so we slowed
down, it being easier to be a cow's tail than to get all out of
breath. Poetry and I were side by sid