gun in a positively weird
manner and was continuing along the same lines. One morning several
weeks after my first acquaintance and turtle adventure with him I had
waked up at dawn and gone to look out of the window just as the morning
star was fading over Old Harpeth. In the dim light I had spied a small
figure down in the garden, hopping along by a row of early young rose
bushes, with a can in one hand and a long stick in the other. Hastily
getting into a few clothes I crept down through the silent house and out
in the garden to find the Stray busily engaged in knocking large slugs
off into a can.

"I feed 'em to mother's bird in the cage, 'cause he can't get out to get
'em," he explained. "They all sleep hard 'cause they work so late and I
crawl out the window and go back while they don't wake up. I like your
yard better than I do mine." The statement was made simply, without envy
of apology.

And from that morning a queer kind of dawn life went on between the
small boy and me. Morning after morning he threw a pebble to waken me
and I hurried down to our tryst, which extended through the hour that
lies between the crack of day and the first glint of the awakening sun.
At first I had carried sweetmeats to our tryst, which were accepted
with moderate pleasure, but one morning I had taken a huge volume of
Rackham's Mother Goose which Nickols had brought me, and from then on
our hour had been one of spiritual communion. I found the young mind
insatiate and I had to ransack the library for stories and poems and
pictures suitable to his years, though he rapidly developed a very
advanced taste. The morning I read him the Shakespearian lines woven
around the little Princes in the Tower, having suitably connected up the
story for him with words of my own, we forgot the time and he overstayed
his limit, for Dabney was opening the house when he fled. For five
mornings he did not come and I could find no way to get news of him. I
asked Mikey and got a maddening response.

"They shut up Stray in the back yard because he's a shame to old Jake,"
was his answer to my question. "Jake would shoot anybody that climbed
that fence."

"I bet I could get over and the bad man not see if I could get out in
the dark," Charlotte declared as she stood listening to my questioning.
"And I am going after Stranger that way, too, if ever they leave the
front door to my house unlocked. It is wicked to shut up a little boy,
and the devil would he