None of us knew, but it was Delia who had the theory. “Well,” she said, “you’ve _got_ to know you’re wicked. It don’t make any difference how wicked. Because you stop anyhow.” “No, you don’t,” Betty said decidedly, “you’re always getting a new thing to be shut in about. Before you mean to,” she added perplexedly. Mary Elizabeth looked away at Grandmother Beers, snipping sweet-peas. Abruptly, Mary Elizabeth threw herself on the grass and stared up through the branches of the Eating Apple tree, and then laid her arms straight along her sides, and began luxuriously to roll down a little slope. The inquiry was too complex to continue. “Let’s go see if the horse-tail hair is a snake yet,” she proposed, sitting up at the foot of the slope. “I’ll have to do my canary,” said Delia, but she sprang up with the rest of us, and we went round to the rain-water barrel. The rain-water barrel stood at the corner of the house, and reflected your face most satisfyingly, save that the eaves-spout got in the way. Also, you always inadvertently joggled the side with your knee, which set the water wavering and wrinkled away the image. At the bottom of this barrel invisibly rested sundry little “doll” pie-tins of clay, a bottle, a broken window-catch, a stray key, and the bowl of a soap-bubble pipe, cast in at odd intervals, for no reason. There were a penny doll and a marble down there too, thrown in for sheer bravado and bitterly regretted. Into this dark water there had now been dropped, two days ago, a long black hair from the tail of Mr. Branchett’s horse, Fanny. We had been credibly informed that if you did this to a hair from a horse’s tail and left it untouched for twenty-four hours or, to be _perfectly_ safe, for forty-eight hours, the result would inevitably be a black snake. We had gone to the Branchetts’ barn for the raw material and, finding none available on the floor, we were about to risk jerking it from the source when Delia had perceived what we needed caught in a crack of the stall. We had abstracted the hair, and duly immersed it. Why we wished to create a black snake, or what we purposed doing with him when we got him created, I cannot now recall. I believe the intention to have been primarily to see whether or not they had told us the truth--“they” standing for the universe at large. For my part, I was still smarting from having been detected sitting in patience with a handful of salt, by the mouse-hole in the shed, in pursuance of another recipe which I had picked up and trusted. Now if this new test failed....