t and walk to the top of the hill. A suspicious horse
turned his head now and again and cast his eye upon the buggy to be sure
that no one climbed in again.

Presently you came to the toll-gate at the top and paid its keeper five
cents, or whatever large sum he demanded. Then your grandfather--if by
fortunate chance you happened to have one--asked after his wife and
children, and had they missed the croup; then told him his corn was looking
well.

My grandfather--for it is time you knew him--lived with us. Because of a
railway accident fifteen years before in which one of his legs was cut off
just below the knee, he had retired from public office. Several years of
broken health had been followed by years that were for the most part free
from suffering. My own first recollection reverts to these better years.
I recall a tall man--to my eyes a giant, for he was taller even than my
father--who came into the nursery as I was being undressed. There was a
wind in the chimney, and the windows rattled. He put his crutches against
the wall. Then taking me in his arms, he swung me aloft to his shoulder
by a series of somersaults. I cried this first time, but later I came to
demand the performance.

Once, when I was a little older, I came upon one of his discarded wooden
legs as I was playing in the garret of the house. It was my first
acquaintance with such a contrivance. It lay behind a pile of trunks and I
was, at the time, on my way to the center of the earth, for the cheerful
path dove into darkness behind the chimney. You may imagine my surprise. I
approached it cautiously. I viewed it from all sides by such dusty light as
fell between the trunks. Not without fear I touched it. It was unmistakably
a leg--but whose? Was it possible that there was a kind of Bluebeard in the
family, who, for his pleasure, lopped off legs? There had been no breath of
such a scandal. Yet, if my reading and studies were correct, such things
had happened in other families not very different from ours; not in our own
town maybe, but in such near-by places as Kandahar and Serendib--places
which in my warm regard were but as suburbs to our street, to be gained if
you persevered for a hundred lamp-posts. Or could the leg belong to Annie
the cook? Her nimbleness with griddle-cakes belied the thought: And once,
when the wind had swished her skirts, manifestly she was whole and sound.
Then all at once I knew it to be my grandfather's. Grown familiar, I p