"Here, Byrd, you hold Jude," I said, suddenly; and giving the halter to
the dirty fledgling, who was snubbing tears in his distress over the
accident to his old friend, I quit the scene of the operation and fled
to the woods to faint down on a log and be as ill as I wanted to. It was
rather bad; and it lasted about a quarter of an hour.

Then, with my head turned determinedly away from the barn, I sought
distraction in an interview with my garden.

Oh, it was rapturous! Can anything in the world be as wonderful as
putting queer little brown things in the earth, where it scares you to
think of their getting all cold and wet and rotted, and then coming to
see them sprout and curl and run out of the ground? No, nothing can
compare with it unless it is seeing whole rows of them bursting out into
blooms and tassels and little pods and burrs. I felt extravagant and
wanted to kiss the whole vegetable family in a way of encouragement and
greeting. And the two lilacs were both most beautifully plumed out in
their long, white blossoms to greet me. Now, weren't they the plucky
young things to bloom that way in a perfectly strange place? Still,
everybody always did have confidence in Sam.

But then in every joy patch some weeds are bound to shoot up overnight,
and I was horrified to look down the rows of purple beet fronds and see
what a lot of bold pepper-grass and chickweed were doing in their
trenches. Without waiting to get my gloves from my bag in the car, I
fell to and began a determined onslaught. Furiously I charged down two
rows and up a third, at whose end I sank with exhaustion.

"Say, Betty, could a cat give kitten dinner to a poor little duck that