“Good health to you, my dear and illustrated uncle! It gives——”
“No, no, my pet, ‘my dear and illustrious uncle,’ and was there not something that you forgot?”
“Yes, Mother. I forgot to make my bow. Shall I make a new beginning?”
“Do so.”
Whereupon Philippe bent nearly double over the edge of the tub, scattering drops of water upon the floor.
“Good health to you, my dear and illustrious uncle. It gives me the most great pleasure to have—eugh! soap in my mouth.... Ptu!——”
“Wait, then, until you are dressed in the new suit I have sewn for you,” and his mother, taking an earthen jar of water from the side of the fire where it had been put to warm, poured it over his head, leaving him no longer a snow boy, but a boy made of the shiniest china you can imagine. “Is that pleasant, my brave one?”
“It is warm, like rain,” said Philippe, lifting his arms above his head. “I will not need another washing for a long, long time, will I, Mother?”
Philippe’s grandparents lived the distance of twelve fields, a small woods, three stiles, and the width of a brook from his own home. Just how far that is, is hard to say. You see it makes such a difference whom you ask. Ask the swallows and they will tell you airily that it is no distance at all, just a flick of the wing, and you are there. But ask the snails who live under the broad leaves of the flowering mulleins, and after pondering a long time, they will tell you that it gives them a headache to think of such a tremendous distance, that it would surely take several lifetimes to travel so far, and as for themselves, they would consider it very foolish to start out on such a dangerous adventure when there were plenty of young lettuces so close at hand! To a small boy of eight, it was quite a long journey, taken alone, particularly when he could not take the short cut by wriggling through the tangled copse for fear of tearing his new suit, or being covered with last year’s burrs and barbed seeds of the undergrowth. But he reached his Grandparents’ house at last.
It was a little house built by the side of a river, actually touching the water on one side, so that you could step out of a door, down a step, and into a rowboat. And there were white swans and yellow-breasted ducks with bronze-green backs swimming in the reflection of the pink walls. On the land side was a poplar tree, very tall and dressed in silvery blue leaves, standing erect like a giant soldier on guard before a toy house. Once Philippe’s Grandfather had explained to him how he could tell the time of day by the shadow this tree cast: when it struck across the chimney at the corner of the house, it was time to go into the fields; when it crossed the front door, it was time to enter therein for the midday meal, and when it pointed out toward the fields, that was a signal for Grandmother to ring the great bell that would call the workers home.