areful on scrubbing days to scrape your feet
upon the iron outside and to cross the kitchen on the unwashed parts, then
it is likely that you stood in the good graces of the cook. Mark your
reward! As you journeyed upward, you munched upon a cookie and bit scallops
in its edge. Or if a ravenous haste was in you--as commonly comes up in the
middle afternoon--you waived this slower method and crammed yourself with
a recklessness that bestrewed the purlieus of your mouth. If your ears lay
beyond the muss, the stowage was deemed decent and in order.

Is there not a story in which children are tracked by an ogre through the
perilous wood by the crumbs they dropped? Then let us hope there is no ogre
lurking on these back stairs, for the trail is plain. It would be near the
top, farthest from the friendly kitchen, that the attack might come, for
there the stairs yielded to the darkness of the attic. There it was best
to look sharp and to turn the corners wide. A brave whistling kept out the
other noises.

It was after Aladdin had been in town that the fires burned hottest in us.
My grandfather and I went together to the matinee, his great thumb within
my fist. We were frequent companions. Together we had sat on benches in the
park and poked the gravel into patterns. We went to Dime Museums. Although
his eyes had looked longer on the world than mine, we seemed of an equal
age.

The theatre was empty as we entered. We carried a bag of candy against a
sudden appetite--colt's foot, a penny to the stick. Here and there ushers
were clapping down the seats, sounds to my fancy not unlike the first corn
within a popper. Somewhere aloft there must have been a roof, else the day
would have spied in on us, yet it was lost in the gloom. It was as though
a thrifty owner had borrowed the dusky fabrics of the night to make his
cover. The curtain was indistinct, but we knew it to be the Stratford
Church and we dimly saw its spire.

Now, on the opening of a door to the upper gallery, there was a scampering
to get seats in front, speed being whetted by a long half hour of waiting
on the stairs. Ghostly, unbodied heads, like the luminous souls of lost
mountaineers--for this was the kind of fiction, got out of the Public
Library, that had come last beneath my thumb--ghostly heads looked down
upon us across the gallery rail.

And now, if you will tip back your head like a paper-hanger--whose Adam's
apple would seem to attest a life of sidereal