, with a
sinking heart, that it was an affliction which was to stay with him
for the rest of his natural life. But a night's sleep did much to
restore the over-taxed eye-muscles and before the end of a week they
had entirely righted themselves.

To-morrow Dinkie will probably want to be an aeronaut, and the next
day a cowboy, and the next an Indian scout, for I notice that his
enthusiasms promptly conform to the stimuli with which he chances to
be confronted. Last Sunday he asked me to read Macaulay's _Horatius_
to him. I could see, after doing so, that it was going to his head
exactly as a second Clover-Club cocktail goes to the head of a
sub-deb. On Tuesday, when I went out about sun-down to get him to help
me gather the eggs, I found that he had made a sword by nailing a bit
of stick across a slat from the hen-house, and also observed that he
had possessed himself of my boiler-top. So I held back, slightly
puzzled. But later on, hearing much shouting and clouting and banging
of tin, I quietly investigated and found Dinkie in the corral-gate,
holding it against all comers. So earnest was he about it, so rapt was
he in that solemn business of warfare, that I decided to slip away
without letting him see me. He was sixteen long centuries away from
Casa Grande, at that moment. He was afar off on the banks of the
Tiber, defending the Imperial City against Lars Porsena and his
footmen. All Rome was at his back, cheering him on, and every time his
hen-coop slat thumped that shredded old poplar gate-post some proud
son of Tuscany bit the dust.

_Sunday the Twenty-Fifth_

Duncan, it's plain to see, is still in the doldrums. He is
uncommunicative and moody and goes about his work with a listlessness
which is more and more disturbing to me. He surprised his wife the
other day by addressing her as "Lady Selkirk," for the simple reason,
he later explained, that I propose to be monarch of all I survey, with
none to dispute my domain. And a little later he further intimated
that I was like a miser with a pot of gold, satisfied to live anywhere
so long as my precious family-life could go clinking through my
fingers.

That was last Sunday--a perfect prairie day--when I sat out on the end
of the wagon-box, watching Poppsy and Dinkie. I sat in the warm
sunlight, in a sort of trance, staring at those two children as they
went about their solemn business of play. They impressed me as two
husky and happy-bodied little beings