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beans or gingerbread on people who had already eaten their fill.
    The swamp echoed with the ringing of axes and mallets and the cries of men as they heaved the upper logs into place. By sundown the McCantrys had a house of their own. All the hard work was done and only the finishing was left for Mr. McCantry. As the neighbors prepared to depart, other gifts came out of their wagons: a sack of potatoes, a rocking chair, a bushel of turnips, a goosefeather pillow, strings of dried apples, a couple of live chickens.
    At the last moment Mr. Woodlawn nailed up a shelf by the new fireplace. No one knew why until Caddie and Emma came breathlessly over the fields from the Woodlawns’ house carrying the McCantrys’ clock. Caddie and her father had sat up late in the attic shop the night before to take it all apart, clean it, and coax it to run. Now it ticked away on the shelf as gay as a cricket.
    “There!” said Caddie triumphantly. “A house is ready to live in when a clock is ticking in it!”
    “My land!” said Mrs. McCantry. “That clock hasn’t ticked for years—just like us, I guess.” Her bonnet was all crooked with excitement and the purple pansies bobbed and trembled over one ear, but for once her eyes were perfectly frank and honest. “I know what you’ve been thinking of us, Mrs. Woodlawn,” she said slowly. “Shiftless, you thought, and I guess you were right. But we’ve seen what neighbors can be like today. We’re going to set right out to be good neighbors ourselves. You won’t ever regret all that you have done for us!”
    The two women looked at each other and for the first time they smiled in sudden understanding. Caddie and Emma smiled at each other, too, and hugged each other.
    Caddie knew that Mrs. McCantry might often forget her good resolutions, for she was that kind of person; but she knew also that Emma would always make up for Mrs. McCantry’s shortcomings, for Emma was a person to trust.
    The McCantrys would be good neighbors.

FIVE

Animal Kingdom
    E VERYBODY LIKES A PET to care for and love. Of course Nero belonged to the whole family, and there were always young pigs and calves and colts on the farm; but still a personal pet was always welcome in the Woodlawn family.
    Caddie had had her old sheep, Nanny; and now she had her very own lamb, which she had christened Bouncer.
    Hetty and Minnie had a pet chicken, which drew a little cart for them by means of a string harness. In the fall, when Father had banked the foundation of the house for winter, one of the half-grown chickens had been accidentally banked in under the house. There were so many young chickens about that nobody missed this unfortunate one.
    “There’s a chicken cheeping and calling somewhere outside, as if it is in trouble,” Mother had said several days later.
    Everybody listened and, sure enough, they heard it. They hunted the place over for several more days with no success. The cheeping and crying always sounded farther away when they went out of doors. It was only in the kitchen that the sound came clear and loud. They searched on the kitchen roof, they tapped the kitchen walls, but it was only when they saw Nero cocking his ears and looking down atthe kitchen floor that it occurred to anyone to remember the space between the floor and the ground.
    Hetty was all for having up the kitchen floor at once to rescue the poor fowl, but Tom said, “No, it must have got through that open place in the foundation and been too frightened to come out while Father and Robert were banking the foundation with sod and straw. The thing to do is to pull away the banking from the open place, and someone crawl in there and get the chicken.”
    “Well, do as you like,” said Mrs. Conroy, “so long as ye do it outside. But divil a bit will I let ye tear up my fine kitchen floor for the likes of a chicken.”
    By the time they had come to the decision to act on Tom’s advice, the cries of the chicken had grown quite faint and