dozen neighbours) and any number of dogs, plumbers, ash men, masons, carpenters and cesspool drainers, washed out by Long Island thunderstorms and sliced into divots by croquet mallets, is likely to be a little untidy. And so it was. Mr. Mistletoe tried hard, but his face had a discouraged look. Almost any fine evening towards katydid time you could see him out there, picking up pebbles Blythe had thrown for the kittens to chase, or bones that Donny had discarded, or looking for the croquet hoop.
But the thrush didn't mind all this. She even seemed to admire the place, and that spring the weather was so moist that there were plenty of worms. A worm means to a thrush much what a hot frankfurter means to a hungry child on a picnic—except that to her it looks like a hot dog five or six feet long.
At one side of his garden Mr. Mistletoe had put up a deck tennis court. Deck tennis is a kind of miniature tennis they play on board ship, not with rackets and a ball but by throwing and catching a rubber quoit which is tossed across the net. The rules and scoring are just like tennis, and the court is like a tennis court but smaller. Mr. Mistletoe had marked it out very carefully
