The warm
body had never wriggled and laughed in the tiny trousseau, the little
shoes had never housed pink toes, but they helped him to pretend until
they became to him things outgrown by a living, growing child. He
cherished them as all parents cherish the first shoes and the first
linens and woolens of their young.

Marthy and Eric Rudd lived just behind the diaphanous curtain of the
pipe smoke, or in the nooks of the twilight shadow, or in the heart of
the settin'-room stove.

The frame house had no fireplace, and in its lieu he was wont to open
the door of the wood-stove, lean forward, elbows on knees, and gaze into
the creamy core of the glow where his people moved unharmed and radiant,
like the three youths conversing in the fiery furnace.

In the brief period allotted them before bedtime they must needs live
fast. The boy grew at an extraordinary rate and in an extraordinary
manner, for sometimes Rudd performed for him that feat which God Himself
seems not to achieve in His world; he turned back time and brought on
yesterday again, or reverted the year before last, as a reaper may pause
and return to glean some sheaf overlooked before.

For instance, Eric was already a strapping lad of seven spinning through
school at a rate that would have given brain fever to a less-gifted
youngster, when, one day, Farmer Stebbins came to the Emporium with a
four-year-old chub of a son who ran in ahead of his father, kicked his
shoes in opposite directions and yelled, to the great dismay of an old
maid in the "Ladies' and Misses' Dept.":

"Hay, mister, gimme pair boots 'ith brass toes!"

The father, after a formulaic pretense of reproving the lad, explained:

"We'll have to excuse him, Rudd; it's his first pair of boots."

Rudd's heart was sore within him, and he was oppressed with guilt. He
had never bought Eric his first pair of brass-toed boots! And he a shoe
clerk!

So that night Eric had to be reduced several years, brought out of
school, and taken to St. Louis. Rudd knew what an epoch-making event
this was, and he wanted Eric to select from a larger stock than the
meager and out-of-date supply of Kittredge's Emporium--though this
admission was only for Rudd's own family. The thumb-screw could not have
wrung it from him for the public.

There was a similar mix-up about Eric's first long trousers which Rudd
likewise overlooked. He accomplished the Irish miracle of the tight
boots. Eric had worn his breeches a l