r my traps
about me, for with the years my work had somehow invited a
paraphernalia of shelves and files, and a variety of other furniture
that required room. It was better for a growing-up family, too. With me
out of the house, they had more freedom to grow up in, which, after all,
was their human right, and the growing-up machinery could revolve as
noisily as it pleased without furnishing a procrastinating author an
added excuse for not working. No author with a growing-up family should
work in his own home. He is impossible enough under even the best
conditions.

[Illustration]

And how the family did grow up. Why, once when they were home from
school I came from the study one day to find a young man in the house--a
strange young man, from somewhere in the school neighborhood. I couldn't
imagine what he was doing there until I was taken aside and it was
explained to me that he was there to see our eldest, the Pride. That
little girl, imagine! It is true she was eighteen--I counted, up on my
fingers to see--but the Pride! why, only yesterday she was bare-footed,
wading in the brook. Somehow I couldn't make it seem right.

IV

_And then one eventful day_

I suppose it was about that time that we acquired a car--it would be
likely to be about that time. 'Most everybody was getting cars, and Lord
Beaconsfield, good Old Beek, was getting slower each year and could no
longer keep up even with our deliberate progress. Furthermore, I learned
to drive the car, in time. It is true I knocked some splinters from the
barn, put a crimp in a mud-guard, and smashed another man's tail-light
in the process, but nothing fatal occurred, though I found it a pretty
good plan to stick fairly close to my new study on the cedar slope if I
wanted to keep up with the garage and damage bills. Those bills startled
me, at first, and then, like everybody else, I became callous and
reckless, and we did without a good many other things in order that the
car might not go unshod or climb limpingly the stiff New England hills.

And then at last, one eventful day--a day far back in that happy,
halcyon age when ships sailed as freely across the ocean as ferry-boats
across the North River and men roved at will among the nations of the
earth--one sunny August morning, eight years after the day of our
coming, we locked the old house behind us and drove away in the car to a
New York pier and sailed with it (the car, I mean, not the pier) to the
Med