course, you've come out now, and you'll be going to receptions and
dances all the time."

"I can't exactly cry O joy, O joy at the thought of it. There must have
been gypsies in my family somewhere. You'll think I'm crazy, but I'd
like to go out right now and run a mile. But there will be skating
afterwhile; and snowstorms to go walking in. I like walking in
snowstorms,--the blustering kind where you can't see and go plunking
into fences."

Fred agreed to this; he readily visualized Phil tramping 'cross-country
in snowstorms. "It's an awful thing," Phil resumed, "to have to be
respectable. Aunt Kate wants to go South this winter and take me with
her. But that would mean being shut up in a hotel. If daddy didn't have
to work, I'd make him take me to California where we could get a wagon
and just keep camping. Camping out is the most fun there is in _this_
world. There's a nice wooziness in waking up at night and hearing an
owl right over your head; and there are the weather changes, when you go
to sleep with the stars shining and wake up and hear the rain slapping
the tent. And when you've gone for a long tramp and come back tired and
wet and hungry, and sit and talk about things awhile and then tumble
into bed and get up in the morning to do it all over again--! Does that
sound perfectly wild? If it does, then I'm crazy, for that's the kind of
thing I like--not to talk about it at parties in my best clothes, but to
go out and do it and keep on doing it forever and ever."

She put the last crumb of the Bartlett cake into her mouth meditatively.

"I like the outdoors, too," said Fred, for whom this statement of her
likings momentarily humanized his goddess and brought her within the
range of his understanding. "The earth is a good old earth. There are no
jars in the way she does her business. There's something that makes me
feel sort o' funny inside when I go out now and see that little
wheat-patch of mine, and know that the snow is going to cover it, and
that with any kind of good luck it's going to live right through the
cold and come to harvest next summer. And it gives me a queer feeling,
and always did, the way it all goes on--and has always gone on since the
beginning of the world. When I was a little boy here in Montgomery and
went to Center Church Sunday-School, the most interesting things in the
Bible were about those Old Testament people, raising cattle and tending
flocks and farming just like the people rig