"You can fire a ball 'bout as well as a boy!" "I should hope so." "My sister can't, and she's a year older 'n me. Most girls can't, and they're all awful mad they wasn't born boys." "That so?" "Yes. I know a girl over the river--awfully jolly girl--she's got a monkey--nicest girl I ever knew!--and Geerusalem! don't she want to be a boy!" "She _must_ be a ninny," observed his next-door neighbor. "Hey?" "Can't think why any girl in her senses should want to be a _boy_!" as who should say: the least of created things. Jerry widened saucer eyes. "If a girl likes," his neighbor continued, "she can do all the jolly things a boy does without the bother of _being_ a boy." "Ho! ho! Don't find it much bother." "Well, but it's a little dull, ain't it?" "Hey?" "Not now exactly, but don't you ever think about the future?" Jerry looked vaguely alarmed for a single instant, and then strutted off with his hands in his pockets, whistling defiantly all across the lawn. He stopped at the barn door, and whistled his way back, in time to catch a friendly ball. The feminine wile that eventually won the young gentleman's heart, and "did for" the girl with the pet monkey, was Val's gift for turning the most surprisingly rapid somersaults all across the drying-ground. A small contorting ball, she rolled head over heels, without stopping, from one side to the other, and came up smiling, in spite of a crack on her crown against the pump. "Gee-_rusalem_!" observed Jerry, when he saw she was laughing. "I say," he added, with a child's fine disregard for preface or preliminary--"I say, come over to Bentley's Pond and let's be pirates." It seems highly probable that Val would have closed with the offer if Emmie had not made a timely appearance. "What you doin'?" she asked, Jerry being invisible. "None o' your business," said her polite sister. "Oh-h," purred Emmie. "Gamma don't let us--" She paused. "Don't let us what?" "What you're doin'." "What am I doin'?" It was difficult to say. She seemed to be just sauntering about, occasionally kicking an osage orange. But Emmie, not without reason, had got it into her law-abiding head that whatever this sister of hers might be engaged in it was pretty sure to be something taboo, and Emmie, as an older inhabitant here, and one who never made these mistakes, was bound to keep the new-comer from transgression. Her sister had gone back to the house now. Emmie followed her up-stairs to their room. Val found her trunk gone from the upper hall, and its contents disposed in drawers and wardrobe with Emmie's belongings. Who had done this thing? "Venie," said Emmie.