The advent of the following summer was marked by two events of importance; Mouser, the Penniman cat, after being repeatedly foiled throughout the winter, had gained access to the little house on a day when windows and doors were open for cleaning, stalked the immobile blue jay, and falling upon his prey had rent the choice bird limb from limb, scattering over a wide space wings, feathers, cotton, and twisted wire. Mouser had apparently found it beyond belief that so beautiful a bird should not be toothsome in any single part. But the discoverer of this sacrilege was not horrified as he would have been a year before. He had even the breadth of mind to feel an honest sympathy for poor Mouser, who had come upon arsenic where it could not by any known law of Nature have been apprehended, and who for two days remained beneath the woodshed sick unto death, and was not his old self for weeks thereafter. Wilbur was growing up. Soon after this the other notable event transpired. Frank, the dog, became the proud but worried mother of five puppies, all multicoloured like himself. It is these ordeals that mature the soul, and it was an older Wilbur who went again to the _Advance_ office to learn the loose trade, as his father had written him from New Orleans that he must be sure to do. He had increased his knowledge of convention in the use of capital letters, and that summer, as a day's work, he set up a column of leaded long primer which won him the difficult praise of Sam Pickering. Sam wrote a notice of the performance and printed it in the _Advance_--the budding craftsman feeling a double glow when he sat this up, too. The item predicted that Wilbur Cowan, son of our fellow townsman, Dave Cowan, would soon become one of the swiftest of compositors. This summer he not only inked the forms on Wednesday, but he was permitted to operate the job press. You stood before this and turned a large wheel at the left to start it, after which you kept it going with one foot on a treadle. Then rhythmically the press opened wide its maw and you took out the printed card or small bill and put in another before the jaws closed down. It was especially thrilling, because if you should keep your hand in there until the jaws closed you wouldn't have it any longer.