Page:The Story of Opal.djvu/44

12 unto him. I slipped around near Michael Angelo Sanzio Raphael. I peeked in between the fence-rails. Aphrodite was again in the pig-pen. She was snoozing, so I tiptoed over to the rain-barrel by the barn. I raised mosquitoes in the rain-barrel for my pet bats. Aristotle eats more mosquitoes than Plato and Pliny eat.

On my way to the house I met Clementine, the Plymouth Rock hen, with her family. She only has twelve baby chickens now. The grandpa say the other one she did have died of new monia because I gave it too many baths for its health. When I came to the house one of the cats, a black one, was sitting on the doorstep. I have not friendly feelings for that big black cat. Day before the day that was yesterday I saw him kill the mother hummingbird. He knocked her with his paw when she came to the nasturtiums. I didn't even speak to him.

Just as I was going to knock on the back door for the milk, I heard a voice on the front porch. It was the voice of a person who has an understanding soul. I hurried around to the front porch. There was Sadie McKibben with a basket on her arm. She beamed a smile at me. I went over and nestled up against her blue gingham apron with cross stitches on it. The freckles on Sadie McKibben's wrinkled face are as many as are the stars in the Milky Way, and she is awful old—going on forty. Her hands are all brown and cracked like the dried-up mud-