And he wondered why I smiled.

_Sunday the First_

Little Dinky-Dink is fast asleep in his hand-carved Scandinavian cradle.
The night is cool, so we have a fire going. Big Dinky-Dunk, who has been
smoking his pipe, is sitting on one side of the table, and I am sitting
on the other. Between us lies the bundle of house-plans which have just
been mailed up to us from Philadelphia. This is the second night we've
pored over them. And we've decided what we're to do at Casa Grande.
We're to have a telephone, as soon as the railway gets through, and a
wind-mill and running water, and a new barn with a big soft-water tank
at one end, and a hot-water furnace in the new house and sleeping
porches and a butler's pantry and a laundry chute--and next winter in
California, if we want it. And Dinky-Dunk blames himself for never
having had brains enough to plant an avenue or two of poplars or
Manitoba maples about Casa Grande, for now we'll have to wait a few
years for foliage and shade. And he intends to have a playground for
little Dinky-Dink, for he agrees with me that our boy must be strong and
manly and muscular, and must not use tobacco in any form until he is
twenty at least. And Dinky-Dunk has also agreed that I shall do all the
punishing--if any punishing is ever necessary! His father, by the way,
has just announced that he wants Babe to go to McGill and then to
Oxford. But I have been insisting on Harvard, and I shall be firm about
this.

That promised to bring us to a dead-lock, so we went back to our
house-plans again, and Dinky-Dunk pointed out that the new living-room
would be bigger than all our present shack and the annex put together.
And that caused me to stare about our poor little cat-eyed cubby-hole of
a wickyup and for the first time realize that our first home was to be
wiped off the map. And nothing would ever be the same again, and even
the prairie over which I had stared in my joy and my sorrow would
always be different! A lump came in my throat. And when Olga came in and
I handed Dinky-Dink to her she could see that my lashes were wet. But
she couldn't understand.

So I slipped over to the piano and began to play. Very quietly I sang
through Herman Lohr's Irish song that begins:

In the dead av the night, acushla,
When the new big house is still ...

But before I got to the last two verses I'm afraid my voice was rather
shaky.

In the dead av the year, acushla,
When me wide new field