friendship which is not blind to any faults, "do you know, Mrs. Lathrop, they said down there that dreams always go by contraries. We was discussing it for a long time, and they ended up by making me believe in it. You see, it all began by my saying how I dreamed last night[Pg 3] that Jathrop was back, and he was a cat and your cat, too, and he did something he wasn't let to, and you made one jump at him, and out of the window he went. Now that was a very strange dream for me to have dreamed, Mrs. Lathrop, and Mrs. Lupey, who's staying with Mrs. Macy to-day and maybe to-morrow, too, says she's sure it's a sign. She says if dreams go by contraries, mine ought to be a sign as Jathrop is coming back, for the contraries is all there: Jathrop wasn't a cat, and he never done nothing that he shouldn't—nor that he should, neither—and you never jump—I don't believe you've jumped in years, have you?"

[Pg 3]

"I—" began Mrs. Lathrop reminiscently.

"Oh, that time don't count," said Susan, "it was just my ball of yarn, even if it did look like a rat; I meant a jump when you meant it; you didn't mean that jump. Well, an' to go back to the dream and what was said about it and to tell you the rest of it, there wasn't any more of it, but there was plenty more said about it. All of the dream[Pg 4] was that the cat went out of the window, and I woke up, but, oh, my, how we did talk! Gran'ma Mullins wanted to know in the first place how I knew that the cat was Jathrop. She was most interested in that, for she says she often dreams of animals, but it never struck her that they might be any one she knew. She dreamed she found a daddy-long-legs looking in her bureau drawer the other night, but she never gave it another thought. She'll be more careful after this, I guess. Well, then I begun to consider, and for the life of me I can't think how I knew that that cat was Jathrop. As I remember it was a very common looking cat, but being common looking wouldn't mean Jathrop. Jathrop was common looking, but not a common cat kind of common looking. It was a very strange dream, Mrs. Lathrop, the more I consider it, the more I can't see what give it to me. I finished up the doughnuts just before I went to bed, for I was afraid they'd mold in another day with this damp weather, but it don't seem as if[Pg 5] doughnuts ought to result in cats like Jathrop. If I'd dreamed of mice, it'd been different, for some of the doughnuts was gnawed in a way as showed as there'd been mice in the jar. It does beat all how mice get about. Maybe it was the mice made me think Jathrop was a cat. But even then I can't see how I did come to dream that dream. Unless 

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