went away wagging his head and saying 

 that he had just picked something that no 

 living thing would eat. When he came back 

 he had a horse-radish bottle that swarmed 

 <^. gr'* n w ^h squash-bugs, twenty or thirty of the vile- 

 smelling things, which he dumped out on 

 the ground and stirred up with a stick. 



Somebody ran and brought K'dunk from 

 one of his hiding-places and set him down 

 on the ground in front of the squirming 

 mess. For a moment he seemed to be 

 eying his proposition with astonishment. 

 Then he crouched down and the swift red 

 tongue-play began. In four minutes, by my 

 watch, every squash-bug that stirred had dis- 

 appeared, and K'dunk finished the others as 

 fast as we could wiggle them with a straw 

 to make them seem alive. 



We gave up trying to beat him on variety 

 after that, and settled down to the apparently 

 simple task of trying to find out how many 

 insects he could eat before calling halt. But 

 even here K'dunk was too much for us ; we 

 never, singly or all together, reached the 

 limit of his appetite. Once we fed him 



