away. But you know how She is. She sits on the damp ground, looking
ahead of her, as if She 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.