t Mr.
Atwater's feet.

"There's your rock," he said.

Mr. Atwater looked down at him fiercely, and through the black
chrysanthemum two garnet sparks glinted waggishly.

"Didn't you hear me tell you what I'd do if you didn't get out o' here,
you darn poodle?"

Gammire "sat up," placed his forepaws together over his nose and
prayed. "There's your rock," he said. And he added, as clearly as if he
used a spoken language, "Let's get on with the game!"

Mr. Atwater turned to Kitty Silver. "Does he--does he know how to speak,
or shake hands, or anything like that?" he asked.

* * * * *

The next morning, as the peculiar old man sat at breakfast, he said to
the lady across the table: "Look here. Who did give Gamin to us?"

Julia bit her lip; she even cast down her eyes.

"Well, who was it?"

Her demureness still increased. "It was--Noble Dill."

Mr. Atwater was silent; he looked down and caught a clownish garnet
gleam out of a blackness neighbouring his knee. "Well, see here," he
said. "Why can't you--why can't you----"

"Why can't I what?"

"Why can't you sit out in the yard the next time he calls here, instead
of on the porch where it blows all through the house? It's just as
pleasant to sit under the trees, isn't it?"

"Pleasanter," said Julia.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

By the end of October, with the dispersal of foliage that has served all
summer long as a screen for whatever small privacy may exist between
American neighbours, we begin to perceive the rise of our autumn high
tides of gossip. At this season of the year, in our towns of moderate
size and ambition, where apartment houses have not yet condensed and at
the same time sequestered the population, one may look over back yard
beyond back yard, both up and down the street; especially if one takes
the trouble to sit for an hour or so daily, upon the top of a high fence
at about the middle of a block.

Of course an adult who followed such a course would be thought peculiar,
no doubt he would be subject to inimical comment; but boys are
considered so inexplicable that they have gathered for themselves many
privileges denied their parents and elders, and a boy can do such a
thing as this to his full content, without anybody's thinking about it
at all. So it was that Herbert Illingsworth Atwater, Jr., sat for a
considerable time upon such a fence, after school hours, every afternoon
of the last week in October; and on