day before.

Johnnie Green didn't need to ask whose lamb this was. He knew at once
that it was his own.

"Where'd you get him?" he demanded.

"At your uncle's!" his father explained.

Johnnie lifted the white lamb out of the buggy and set him down gingerly
upon the ground. And the white lamb didn't try to run off. He was only a
tiny thing, with a very soft coat and a very pink nose.

"I wonder if he's hungry," said Johnnie Green. "I'll get some corn and
see if he wants anything."

"You'll have to feed him milk in a bottle," his father told him. "He
isn't weaned yet. Bring him into the woodshed!"

In a little while Johnnie's father had found a baby's bottle, which he
filled with warm milk.

Then all Johnnie had to do was to hold the bottle to his new pet's
mouth. The lamb did the rest.

"I'm going to call him 'Snowball,'" Johnnie announced. And then he began
to laugh.

"Look at his tail!" he shouted. "He'll switch it off if he isn't
careful."

For as Snowball drank the milk he jerked his stubby tail up and down at
a great rate.

Old dog Spot, who was stretched upon the woodshed threshold, gazed at
Snowball with a lofty air.

"That lamb has a queer notion of the way a tail ought to be wagged," he
said deep down in his throat. "He ought to wag it from side to side. But
I suppose he's too young to know better."

II

A RIDE TO TOWN

Much to old dog Spot's disgust Johnnie Green and his new pet lamb soon
became great friends. It wasn't long before Snowball, as Johnnie called
the white lamb, followed his young master about the yard and even into
the farmhouse--when Mrs. Green wasn't looking.

It was a remark that Johnnie made about Snowball one day which caused
old Spot to speak his mind plainly to the Muley Cow. Johnnie Green
actually said, in Spot's hearing, "Snowball knows as much as a dog!"

"I never did have any use for sheep," Spot told the Muley Cow.
"Everybody knows they're all terribly stupid. So you can imagine how I
felt when Johnnie Green spoke like that to his father."

The Muley Cow chewed her cud. She had a far-off look in her eyes, as if
she might be thinking about what Spot was saying--or as if she might
not. Anyhow, she did not speak.

"And to think--" Spot growled--"to think how I used to take care of
Johnnie when he was no more than a baby! Do you suppose this lamb could
take care of a baby? Do you suppose he'd pull a baby out of the mill
pond? Or fight off a bull? Or kil