AXLE THE FREEWAY CAT

A good-natured, offhand affair--story and pictures--in the raffish spirit, almost, of the senior Hurd's Catfish. Cat Axle lives, invitingly, in an abandoned car under the freeway overpass: ""In back was a bunk to sleep in, and a bureau, and a hook for his hat, and a hook for his coat, and a shoebox for his shoes."" Better still is Axle sitting down to breakfast at the dashboard--and then hanging his pots and pans to dry on the steering wheel. Axle's job, collecting litter for the Department of Highways, has its attractions too--like the shiny new harmonica he finds one day and plays in the front seat in the evening. But no one in the speeding cars gives him a nod, and no one hears his music echoing off the underpass ""as if he were playing in a great cathedral."" So the stage is set for a very happy unstressed ending when Axle helps ""a little cat in a little red car"" that overheats in a traffic jam, they take a spin together, and she turns out--that evening--to play the horn: the auto horn. A childlike conceit altogether--with exuberant pictures to match.