"We gave her chloroform: I held the sponge myself while my cousin performed the operation. It didn't hurt her at all, and she really seemed handsomer without the tail, but a sorry sequel followed. I went to Philadelphia soon after, and while I was there my uncle took me to a dog show. I never before saw so many beautiful dogs and among them was one almost exactly like my Serena, and with three twists in her tail."
"'You have a dog just like mine,' I said to the man who owned her.
"'Has your dog a tail like this?' he asked.
"I told him 'yes,' and was just going on to explain to him how I had had it operated upon when he interrupted me. 'Then it was a good breed,' he said. 'That tail is the mark of a fine dog. Each curl in the tail adds fifteen dollars to the value of the animal.'"
Miss Billy's eyes looked solemnly down into John Thomas's widely distended orbs: "Think of it!" she said: "Forty-five dollars cut off at one fell swoop! I can assure you my cousin has never heard the last of it."
"Dead. Run over by a street car. I cried for months. I don't expect to ever own another like Serena."
John Thomas drew a long breath, and turning to his box began a search for a leather hinge.
Miss Billy felt herself distinctly dismissed, but she still held on to the fence.
"I want to ask you,--" she began again,--"what I can do about a flower bed that's just all stones. I'm trying to dig it, you know."
"Take the stones out," said John Thomas laconically.
"But there wouldn't be anything left! It's _all_ stones!"
"Maybe it's just a fillin', an' there's good dirt underneath," suggested the boy.
"Won't you please step over and look at it?" entreated Miss Billy: so John Thomas, with open reluctance, laid down his hammer and nails, and climbed as awkwardly as possible over the fence.
"If it's fillin' it goes awful deep," he decided, after a quarter of an hour of hard work. "Nothin' can't grow in here."
"But I must have some flowers!" wailed Miss Billy, in despair. "Why, that was one reason that I wanted to come and live on Cherry Street,--because there was a big yard here, you know."
John Thomas was regarding the rocky flower bed musingly. "I'll tell you what I can do," he said at last. "There's more than a foot of this out already,--an' I'll go down to where my father has got some teams hauling dirt from a cellar they're digging, an' I'll bring you a load, if you'd like it. It's good black dirt."