Did not Tant Sannie keep in the
loft bultongs, and nice smoked sausages? There must be something nice to
eat up there! Aha! that was it!
Bonaparte was so interested in carrying out this chain of inductive
reasoning that he quite forgot to have his boots blacked.
He watched the boy shuffle off with the salt-pot under his arm; then he
stood in his doorway and raised his eyes to the quiet blue sky, and audibly
propounded this riddle to himself:
"What is the connection between the naked back of a certain boy with a
greatcoat on and a salt-pot under his arm, and the tip of a horsewhip?
Answer: No connection at present, but there will be soon."
Bonaparte was so pleased with this sally of his wit that he chuckled a
little and went to lie down on his bed.
There was bread-baking that afternoon, and there was a fire lighted in the
brick oven behind the house, and Tant Sannie had left the great wooden-
elbowed chair in which she passed her life, and waddled out to look at it.
Not far off was Waldo, who, having thrown a pail of food into the pigsty,
now leaned over the sod wall looking at the pigs. Half of the sty was dry,
but the lower half was a pool of mud, on the edge of which the mother sow
lay with closed eyes, her ten little ones sucking; the father pig, knee-
deep in the mud, stood running his snout into a rotten pumpkin and
wriggling his curled tail.
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