wrongly picked up on a narcotics charge... he was the maddest and eventually renounced dark glasses and more especially the Spider. For reasons best known to the Spider, Silly Bill was afterwards referred to as Poor Jenny.

One day dark glasses were out . . . finished-I mean man, they were the least. Old Marley and old the Spider were making the scene up at Woolworths, and suddenly the Spider saw a counter of masks-masks were it, man-masks were the word, the whole message in fact. Old Marley and old the Spider bought every mask in the place the cash registers were positively jumping the items of every sale are rung up separately there. Click-click-brinng-click-click-brinng... one thousand, eight hundred and five times. On the way out, the Spider borrowed the chignon. From that day, man, masks were it . . . the thing . . . sharp and the most cool... yah.

That's how I came to be sitting here in a Peter Rabbit mask, up in the Spider's parlor (which used to be the parlor of the Vermouth Bottle's place). The only difference is that the Spider has put up two masks of tragedy and tragedy-the Spider doesn't dig this comedy bit-that the Ladybug had made out of coat hangers and Kleenex. Old, dear Marley was sitting next to me, decked out in a Shirley Temple mask, her pipe unlit in her hand. Since Marley's been the most friend to me for several years, I saw that in spite of the square mask she looked as if she had been swung sick by something. It was maybe the amount of peanuts that the Spider ate per day.

The Spider was whispering his plan for seizing the public library-the Spider always whispered... he was the hottest for whispering. The Spider was so afraid of the fuzz that he was sometimes even afraid that he might turn out to be an undercover agent himself . . . it made some of the evilist cats wonder just what the Spider had done before he became the message . . . what line of business he had been in. The library was to be taken over in the name of the Sinn Fein -the squarest could see that it wasn't the thing to seize it in our-own name, 'cause we had no name and masks were the word. And as old Spider said,

"MAN, you never know, those Irish cats might just welcome a pad full of books, with a couple of cool lions sitting outside...

I wasn't with it. I was getting to be the least, man, the very least. Old Marley was making the organization racket twenty-four square hours a day, not to mention digging up about eighty-two thousand peanuts each and every day for the Spider. There were a lot of things I didn't dig these days-the way the Spider dug those peanuts, the way my rabbit mask didn't fit, the way that old Marley didn't look anymore, and most of all the way she did look. It was the worst man, the worst. Was it that Marley wanted to look like Shirley Temple, or did she just want to pass for S. Temple among those who were not with it? Or take the Spider, which did you believe . . . the moustache in front, or the chignon in back? Taken from the side he was a ringer for one of those cats the Greeks flipped over a number of years ago... not that any one minded, it just made for confusion. Or take the Peter Rabbit mess that was strangling me-the evening of the fateful day that the Spider found the word up at Woolworths', he had found me hanging in up at Dandelion's pad. The Dandelion wound up with a noh ghost mask, but she kept her dark glasses on over it-diehard, real diehard, the old Dandelion, but solid. Old the Spider had edged (he always edged-even when he was going up or down stairs, even when he was in a hurry) over to me and clapped me on the back. He had whispered,

"You go for Peter Rabbit, huh, Little Lou... crazy rabbit. Yah." When I had found my half can of Planters peanuts (that was all we ate in those days, peanuts,

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