he light of that memory phrased
itself at once as Teddiness--a certain Teddidity. To describe it in
and other terms is more difficult. It is nimbleness without grace, and
alertness without intelligence. He whisked out of his shop upon the
pavement, a short figure in grey and wearing grey carpet slippers; one
had a sense of a young fattish face behind gilt glasses, wiry hair that
stuck up and forward over the forehead, an irregular nose that had its
aquiline moments, and that the body betrayed an equatorial laxity, an
incipient "bow window" as the image goes. He jerked out of the shop,
came to a stand on the pavement outside, regarded something in the
window with infinite appreciation, stroked his chin, and, as abruptly,
shot sideways into the door again, charging through it as it were behind
an extended hand.

"That must be him," said my mother, catching at her breath.

We came past the window whose contents I was presently to know by heart,
a very ordinary chemist's window except that there was a frictional
electrical machine, an air pump and two or three tripods and retorts
replacing the customary blue, yellow, and red bottles above. There was
a plaster of Paris horse to indicate veterinary medicines among these
breakables, and below were scent packets and diffusers and sponges and
soda-water syphons and such-like things. Only in the middle there was a
rubricated card, very neatly painted by hand, with these words--

Buy Ponderevo's Cough Linctus NOW.
NOW!
WHY?
Twopence Cheaper than in Winter.
You Store apples! why not the Medicine
You are Bound to Need?

in which appeal I was to recognise presently my uncle's distinctive
note.

My uncle's face appeared above a card of infant's comforters in the
glass pane of the door. I perceived his eyes were brown, and that his
glasses creased his nose. It was manifest he did not know us from Adam.
A stare of scrutiny allowed an expression of commercial deference to
appear in front of it, and my uncle flung open the door.

"You don't know me?" panted my mother.

My uncle would not own he did not, but his curiosity was manifest. My
mother sat down on one of the little chairs before the soap and patent
medicine-piled counter, and her lips opened and closed.

"A glass of water, madam," said my uncle, waved his hand in a sort of
curve and shot away.

My mother drank the water and spoke. "That boy," she said, "takes after
his father. He grow