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It was an odd little procession that filed past Uncle Billy's house every day, on the way to the woods for autumn stores. John Jay came first, with a rickety wagon he had made out of a soap-box and two solid wooden wheels. He looked like a little old man, with his long coat and turned up trowsers.

I remember my inalienable right of free speech and peaceable assemblage, and I get up on a soap-box to trot out the particular economic bees that buzz in my bonnet, and a bull takes me off that box and leads me to the city prison, and after that I get out on bail. It's no use. In Korea I used to be arrested about every other day. It was the same thing in Manchuria. There is no hope for me.

Glad whirled and ran to the hearth. "Ye've put on a lot," she cried; "but, oh, my Gawd, don't it warm yer! Come on, Polly come on." She dragged out a wooden stool, an empty soap-box, and bundled the sacks into a heap to be sat upon. She swept the things from the table and set them in their paper wrappings on the floor.

"And while I was guiding him between the automobiles, I was desperately trying to think how to back up my lie. Who was there that would receive this incredible stranger, and put him up for the night, and get him into proper clothes, and keep him off the soap-box? Truly, I was in an extraordinary position! What had I done to get this stranger wished onto me?

Then he stepped down from his soap-box and swung it on to his shoulders by means of a cord, and went limping off in a strange and anxious haste. Stonehouse pushed roughly through the dispersing, purposeless crowd and caught up with him as he was about to lose himself in a dark network of little squalid streets.

Master Maloney, who had taken advantage of the interruption to edge farther into the room, now appeared to consider the question of his departure permanently shelved. He sidled to a corner and sat down on an empty soap-box with the air of a dramatic critic at the opening night of a new play. The scene looked good to him. It promised interesting developments.

He knelt, and from a former soap-box, in a corner, took a lantern, without a chimney, and a large oil-can, the leak in the latter being so nearly imperceptible that its banishment from household use had seemed to Penrod as inexplicable as it was providential. He shook the lantern near his ear: nothing splashed; there was no sound but a dry clinking.

That there was nothing even remotely resembling a chair in camp she felt reasonably assured, as "paw" was sitting on an inverted soap-box under a pine-tree, and "paw," by reason of age and infirmity, appropriated all luxuries. Mrs. Yellett, with her usual acumen, grasped the situation.

"I got sick of being rocked to sleep every night on that old soap-box. I'll wager, Marty, that this leg will stay put when I get through with it." "Wal! of all things!" grunted Mr. Day, with his head poked in at the open door. "What's Janice doing?" demanded his wife, too heavy to mount the stairs easily.

The little girl thought him the nicest pet she had ever had, and soon fell a willing slave to his wheedling grunts. He was christened "Badgy," and spent the first month of his new life in a warmly padded soap-box in the farm-house kitchen. But by the end of that time he had outgrown the box, and, the weather being warmer, was given the empty potato-bin in the cellar.