nothing further remained to be said. The chaffinches clinked in the
apple trees and the bees droned round the berberis bushes, and the
waning sunlight slanted pleasantly across the garden plots, but
between the neighbour households had sprung up a barrier of hate,
permeating and permanent.

The male heads of the families were necessarily drawn into the
quarrel, and the children on either side were forbidden to have
anything to do with the unhallowed offspring of the other party. As
they had to travel a good three miles along the same road to school
every day, this was awkward, but such things have to be. Thus all
communication between the households was sundered. Except the cats.
Much as Mrs. Saunders might deplore it, rumour persistently pointed
to the Crick he-cat as the presumable father of sundry kittens of
which the Saunders she-cat was indisputably the mother. Mrs.
Saunders drowned the kittens, but the disgrace remained.

Summer succeeded spring, and winter summer, but the feud outlasted
the waning seasons. Once, indeed, it seemed as though the healing
influences of religion might restore to Toad-Water its erstwhile
peace; the hostile families found themselves side by side in the
soul-kindling atmosphere of a Revival Tea, where hymns were blended
with a beverage that came of tea-leaves and hot water and took after
the latter parent, and where ghostly counsel was tempered by
garnishings of solidly fashioned buns--and here, wrought up by the
environment of festive piety, Mrs. Saunders so far unbent as to
remark guardedly to Mrs. Crick that the evening had been a fine one.
Mrs. Crick, under the influence of her ninth cup of tea and her
fourth hymn, ventured on the hope that it might continue fine, but a
maladroit allusion on the part of the Saunders good man to the