be
made just the dearest place!"

"Yes," says I; "but my job is to talk MacGregor into lettin' it go
cheap, or else we can't afford to touch it."

Well, I can't claim it was all my smooth work that did the trick, for
MacGregor had bought the place at a bargain first off, and now he was
anxious to unload. Still, he hadn't been born north of Glasgow for
nothing. But the figures Mr. Robert said would be about right I managed
to shade by twenty per cent., and my lump invoice of that old mahogany
of ours maybe was a bit generous. Anyway, when I goes home that night I
tosses Vee a long envelop.

"What's this?" says she.

"That's your chicken permit," says I. "All aboard for Lilac Lodge! Gee!
I wonder should I grow whiskers, livin' out there?"

CHAPTER VI

TORCHY IN THE GAZINKUS CLASS

I expect I'll get used to it all in time. This rural stuff, I mean. But
it ain't goin' to come easy. When you've been brought up to think of
home as some place where you've got a right to leave your trunk as long
as you pay the rent prompt,--a joint where you have so many square feet
of space on a certain floor, and maybe eight or ten inches of brick and
plaster between you and a lot of strangers,--and then all of a sudden
you switch to a whole house that's all yours, with gobs of land all
around it, and trees and bushes and things that you can do what you like
with--well, it's sort of staggerin' at first.

Why, the day Vee and I moved into this Harbor Hills place that I'd made
the swift trade for with MacGregor Shinn, we just had our baggage dumped
in the middle of the livin'-room, chucked our wraps on some chairs, and
went scoutin' around from one room to another for over an hour, kind of
nutty and excited.

"Oh, look, Torchy!" Vee would exclaim about twice a minute when she
discovered something new.

You know, we'd been in the house only once before, and then we'd looked
around just casual. And if you want to find out how little you really
see when you think you're lookin', you want to make a deal like that
once--buy a joint just as it stands, and then, a few days after, camp
down in it and tot up what you've really got. Why, say, you'd 'most
thought we'd been blindfolded that first time.

Course, this was different. Now we was takin' stock, you might say, of
the things we was goin' to live with. And, believe me, I never had any
idea I'd ever own such a collection, or so big a slice of the U. S. A.

"Only think, Torchy