THE ANIMAL KINGDOM

Presently Gigi and the dog came to a clearing in the forest. All about
was as wild as anything they had passed. But here, quite alone, stood
a little hut made of logs and branches twisted together.

The first thing that Gigi saw, after the hut itself, was an old man in
a coarse gray gown, sitting on a stump, reading a book. His head was
bare, and he had a long white beard. His feet were bare, too, and he
wore leather sandals. A rope was tied about his waist. Gigi had
sometimes seen men so dressed plodding along the highroad or begging
from the townsfolk. If he thought about them at all, he believed them
to be some rival sort of performers, like the Tumblers themselves. It
seemed very queer to see one of the Gray Men here in the lonely
forest,--and with such strange companions! Gigi stared and stared
again, rubbing his tired eyes to make sure that they saw aright.

On the old man's knees was curled, asleep, a comfortable white cat.
Three little kittens played with the knotted ends of his girdle,
swarming up and down the gray gown of the reader. On his shoulder
perched a squirrel, busily eating a nut which he held in his little
paws. Close by, a brown and white deer grazed about the door of the
little hut. A great black raven hopped gravely about the old man's
feet, now and then picking up a bug. Lying peacefully asleep in front
of the hut door, like a yellow mat of fur, a fox was stretched. In and
out among the rose-bushes of a tiny garden which was planted beneath
the window of the hut, hopped several brown hares, seeming much at
home. The old man's head nodded forward on his book. He could sleep
soundly, it seemed, with all these little live things swarming about