had to wriggle in over the transom to shut off the taps and save the house from inundation. On the heels of this she was reported as having bitten the dentist’s fingers when he unexpectedly touched a nerve. She further embarrassed the family and the tranquillity of Tuxedo Park by prying open an express crate and liberating two Russian wolf-hounds awaiting delivery on one end of the neat little depot platform. She claimed, it is true, that the dogs had stood there for a whole day, and wanted to get out, and were starving to death—but that was not a potent factor when it came to final adjustment of damages. She hated the thought of captivity, of course, just as she hated inertia, for two years earlier she had appropriated a niblick for the purpose of demolishing a new French doll, protesting, after the demolition, that she would be satisfied with nothing if she couldn’t carry about something “with real livings in it.” Her preoccupied parents, after the manner of their kind, maintained that she had a blind spot in her moral nature and talked vaguely but hopefully of what school would do to her when the time came. She was, in fact, emerging into her tumultuous teens before she could be persuaded that waxed parquetry was not made for the purpose of sliding on and that a tea-wagon was not the correct thing to cascade down the terrace on. And when the golden key of the printed word might have opened a newer and wider world to her she was allotted a series of exceedingly namby-pamby “uplift” books (kindly suggested by the Bishop one day after he’d had a glance over the Ketley orchids in the greenhouse). These, however, she quietly consigned to the garage water-tank, and having entered into secret negotiations with Muggsie, the head chauffeur’s stepson, she bartered a wrist-watch with a broken hair-spring, a silver-studded dog-collar, and two Tournament racquets for a dog-eared copy of _The Hidden Hand_ and a much-thumbed copy of _The Toilers of the_ _Sea_ with the last seven chapters missing. Then, urged on by that undecipherable ache for freedom, she padded a crotch in the upper regions of the biggest copper-beech on the East Drive, padded it with two plump sofa-pillows, and there ensconcing herself, let her spirit expand in direct ratio to the accruing cramp in her spindly young legs. But copper-beeches are not over-comfortable places to read in, and Teddie developed a settled limp which prompted her mother to shake her head and reiterate a conviction that the child should be looked over by an orthopedic specialist.