I daren't. She forbade it. She is down there in the hollow, with a giganticbasket. The dew is falling and wetting her feet and the sun's goingaway. But you know how She is. She sits on the damp ground, lookingahead 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 armful ofwild thyme and smells it, or calls the tomtits and the jays--who nevercome to her by any chance. She takes a heavy watering pot and--ugh! itgives me the shivers--pours thousands of icy, goldy threads over theroses or into the hollows of those little stone troughs, 'way back inthe woods. I always look in to look at the head of a brindle-bull who comesto meet me and to drink up the pictures of the leaves, but She pulls meback by the collar with: "Toby, Toby, _that_ water is for the birds."... Then She takes out her knife and opens nuts, fifty, a _hundblack_nuts, and forgets the time ... There's no end to the skinnygs She does.

KIKI-THE-DEMURE, (_slyly_)

And what do you do all that time?

T0BY-D0G