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CZECHOSLOVAK STORIES

and whimpered: “Couldn’t you have given it to me? It would have done me more good than them.”

The doghouse with the star and the moon ornaments which Matýsek had joyously planned on for so long, he made for himself.

“Why shouldn’t we ourselves have something unusual?” he said to Barka. And he bought a dog to put in the kennel. Although it was a white dog, he called it “Gypsy.” His former mistress had a dog named “Gypsy” and he could not break himself of the habit of calling every dog by that name.

When the weather was windy or stormy, Matýsek would lose himself in thought for two hours at a time.

“What have you in your head again?” Barka would ask, smiling proudly meanwhile. She knew he was planning something that no one else would have thought of. And she was right.

“I was debating whether a person could make some sort of cage or trap to catch the wind and hold it. That would be an advantage to us in our mountains here, wouldn’t it, our Barka?”

From the time they had married, they never addressed each other otherwise than "our Barka” and “our Matýsek.”

Barka assented that it would indeed be a great convenience for people to entrap the wind so that it would do no harm.

“Well, who knows? You may work it out successfully,” she often said. “When people have been able