he were asleep--or lies flat on her stomach,
whistling and watching an ant in the grass ... She tears up a handful of
wild thyme and smells it, or calls the tomtits and the jays--who never
come to her by any chance. She takes a heavy watering pot and--ugh! it
gives me the shivers--pours thousands of icy, silvery threads over the
roses or into the hollows of those little stone troughs, 'way back in
the woods. I always look in to see the head of a brindle-bull who comes
to meet me and to drink up the pictures of the leaves, but She pulls me
back by the collar with: "Toby, Toby, _that_ water is for the birds."
... Then She takes out her knife and opens nuts, fifty, a _hundred_
nuts, and forgets the time ... There's no end to the things She does.

KIKI-THE-DEMURE, (_slyly_)

And what do you do all that time?

TOBY-DOG

I--well--I just wait for her.

KIKI-THE-DEMURE

I admire you!

TOBY-DOG

Once in a while, squatting down, She eagerly scratches the earth, toils
and sweats over it; then I jump 'round her, delighted to see her at
something so useful and so familiar. But her feeble scent deceives her.
_I_ never smell mole, or shrew-mouse-of-the-rosy-paws, in the holes
_She_ digs. And how explain her utter lack of purpose? Presently,
falling back on her haunches, She brandishes a hairy-rooted herb and
cries: "I have it, the jade!" I lie in the damp grass and tremble, or
dig my nose (She calls it my snout) into the earth to get the
complicated odors of it. ... When there are three or four scents all
blended, all mixed together, can you distinguish that of the mole from
that of the hare which passed quickly, or the bird which rested there?

KIKI-THE-DEMURE

Certainly I can. My nose is highly educated. It's small, regular, wide
between my eyes, delicate at the chamois-skin end of my nostrils; the
lightest touch of a blade of grass, the shadow of smoke tickles and
makes it sneeze. It doesn't bother about distinguishing the scent of
moles from that of--hares, did you say? But it delights in the trace
left by a cat in a hedge ... I've a charming nose. She calls it, "his
pretty little nose of cotton velvet." Since my eyes opened on this world
I've not known the day that someone has not uttered a truthful flattery
on the subject of my nose. Now yours--is a rough-grained truffle. What
makes you move it so ridiculously? At this very moment.

TOBY-DOG

I'm hungry and I don't hear the plates.

KIKI-THE-DEMURE

... your