realized that he
needed all the dynamics of courage in the preposterous task he had set
himself.

He knew he would find old Etienne sitting on the stoop of Mother
Maillet's house where the old man posted himself on pleasant summer
evenings and whittled whirligigs for the crowding children--just as his
peasant ancestors whittled the same sort of toys in old Normandy.

Mother Maillet's house had a yard. It was narrow and dusty, because the
feet of the children had worn away all the grass. Some of the palings
were off the fence, and through the spaces the little folks came and
went as they liked. It was not much of a yard to boast of, but there
were few open spaces in that part of the city where the big land
corporation hogged all the available feet of earth in order to stick the
tenement-houses closely together. Therefore, because Mother Maillet was
kind, the yard was a godsend so far as the little folks were concerned.
The high fence kept children off the greensward where the canal flowed.
Householders who had managed to save their yards down that way were, in
most cases, fussy old people who were hanging on to the ancient cottage
homes in spite of the city's growth, and they shooed the children out of
their yards where the flower-beds struggled under the coal-dust from the
high chimneys.

But Mother Maillet did not mind because she had no flower-beds and
because the palings were off and the youngsters made merry in her
yard. She had two geraniums and a begonia and a rubber-plant on the
window-sill in order to give the canary-bird a comfortable sense of
arboreal surroundings; so why have homesick flowers out in a front yard
where they must all the time keep begging the breeze to come and dust
the grime off their petals? It should be understood that Mother Maillet
had known what _real_ flower-beds were when she was a girl in the
Tadousac country.

Furthermore, Etienne Provancher always came to the yard o' fine evenings
and it served as his little realm; and the door-step of the good woman's
house was his throne where he sat in state among his little subjects.
However, on second thought, this metaphor is not happy description; old
Etienne did not rule--he obeyed.

He did not resent familiarity--he welcomed the comradeship of the
children. When they called him "Pickaroon" it seemed to him that they
were making a play-fellow of him.

He sat and whittled toys for them out of the pine-wood scraps which the
yard forema