"One on Pennsylvania Avenue." "Was it a green car or a yellow one?" "It was a yellow one." "It wasn't a wed car?" "No, it was a yellow one." "Oh! Well--" "Well, as I got on, a man stepped on the back platform, and his dog wanted to get on, too. But the man drove him back and then got on, thinking, I suppose, that the dog had gone home. But instead of that the dog ran to the front of the car, and when the car started he walked in and stood in front of his master, as much as to say, 'Well, I did it, anyway!' Wasn't he a smart dog?" Philip was silent a moment. "Didn't he say anything?" "Who--the man?" "No--the dog." "Why, certainly not." "Didn't he wink?" "Wink? No." "What did the man say?" "He didn't say anything. He opened his paper and went to reading." Philip waited. "What's the rest of it?" he asked at length. "There isn't any more. That's the end of the story." He said it in rather a shame-faced way. Philip raised himself to a sitting posture and looked his uncle straight in the eye. "Unker Wichard," he said, quietly, "did you think that was a story?" "I had thought so," acknowledged Mr. De Jarnette. "I see my mistake now." Then, with a momentary flash of spirit, he enquired, "What's wrong with that story, any way?" "It don't begin right. You have to say, 'Once on a time--'" "Oh, you do? Well, if you know my story better than I do, suppose you tell it." "I can't," said Philip. "I'd rather tell you when you get it wrong," thus unconsciously enunciating a principle of criticism as old as time. If all the critics had to pass a novitiate as image-makers before they were admitted to the bar as image-breakers, there is danger that the race would become extinct. But this critic was not through. "And then--Unker Wichard, do you think a dog that don't say anything in a story 'mounts to much?" "But, Philip, dogs don't talk, you know." "Wolfs talk." Philip was reasoning from analogy. "And so do bears. Don't you 'member the old papa bear saying, 'Who's been sitting in my chair?' and the little baby bear saying, 'Who's been sitting in my chair?'" suiting his tone to their respective ages and sizes. "And don't you 'member 'bout _Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit_?" "But they were not dogs," weakly suggested the story-teller, conscious that he was begging the question. "The dogs talk in my mama's stories. And she knows their names, too. Unker Wichard! _where_ is _ma-a-ma_?" With the blue eyes filling and that blood-curdling sentence on the grieved lips, Richard De Jarnette felt the hair of his flesh rising. "Philip," he said, hastily, "do you want me to tell you 'Little Red Riding Hood?'" This was Philip's favorite story, and he swallowed his tears and prepared to listen.