ap which it is."

"Yes, sir."

"Of course, now, you hear human people swell and brag and strut round
about how they are different from the animals and have something they
call a soul that the animals haven't got, but that's just the natural
conceit of this electricity or something before it has found out much
about itself. Not different from the animals, you ain't. This tree I'm
leaning against is your second or third cousin. Only difference, you
can walk and talk and see. Understand?"

"Yes, sir," said Wilbur. "Couldn't we go up to the gypsy camp now?"

Dave refilled the calabash pipe, lighted it, and held the match while it
burned out.

"That fire came from the sun," he said. "We're only burning matches
ourselves--burning with a little fire from the sun. Pretty soon it
flickers out."

"It's just over this next hill, and they got circus wagons and a fire
where they cook their dinners, right outdoors, and fighting roosters,
and tell your fortune."

Dave rose.

"Of course I don't say I know it all yet. There's a catch in it I
haven't figured out. But I'm right as far as I've gone. You can't go
wrong if you take the facts and stay by 'em and don't read books that
leave the facts to one side, like most books do."

"Yes, sir," said Wilbur, "and they sleep inside their wagons and I wish
we had a wagon like that and drove round the country and lived in it."

"All right," said his father. "Stir your stumps."

They followed the path that led up over another little hill winding
through clumps of hazel brush and a sparse growth of oak and beech. From
the summit of this they could see the gypsy camp below them, in an open
glade by the roadside. It was as the Wilbur twin had said: there were
gayly-painted wagons--houses on wheels--and a campfire and tethered
horses and the lolling gypsies themselves. About the outskirts loafed a
dozen or so of the less socially eligible of Newbern. Above a fire at
the camp centre a kettle simmered on its pothook, being stirred at this
moment by a brown and aged crone in frivolous-patterned calico, who wore
gold hoops in her ears and bangles at her neck and bracelets of silver
on her arms--bejewelled, indeed, most unbecomingly for a person of her
years.

The Wilbur twin would have lingered on the edge of the glade with other
local visitors, a mere silent observer of this delightful life; he had
not dreamed of being accepted as a social equal by such exalted beings.
But his father sta