“What? Were there three of us, Sandy?”
“Yes, maarstar, you know one of them was yaller. He never did look like he come from this country.”
“Do you swear it, Sandy?” I asked, placing my hand on his shoulder.
“I sirtainly do, maarstar;” said he, looking up at me as if I were bereft of my reason.
“Thank heaven!” I uttered aloud, “I almost thought that I might be going mad. We must leave this city, Sandy, for while I am here, I keep thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking of the days I spent here once as a boy. Oh, Sandy, that morning in May when I awoke to find that it was true! Too true! You remember, the following February Miss Susanne died?—Let us pack the trunks.”
XII
When I was a child of four, long, long ago, as it seems to me, some friend gave my father a setter dog. And my father named him “Tim,” for the giver’s name was Timothy.
Tim and our old gardener, Sandy’s father, whose name was Uncle Robert, were about the only friends of my early childhood. I remember how in the fall of every year, when the chestnut burrs used to get big and the pippins began to ripen, Uncle Robert used to dig up all the potatoes and make them into a huge mound at the end of our garden. Then he would rake together in heaps the dead and falling leaves, and use them for a warm covering for the potato mound in order to protect the potatoes from the snow and frost, for he kept them there all winter, and only brought them up to the kitchen as the cook needed them. Uncle Robert’s mountain of potatoes always impressed me as being perfectly wonderful. Indeed most everything that Uncle Robert did, came pretty near to the marvelous. Upon the first fall of snow, I used to get a staff, and scale that mountain, and pose on the summit “like stout Cortez—silent, upon a peak in Darien.” I have crossed the Rockies and the Alps since, but not one of them has seemed quite so high or inspiring. Sometimes I think that when a child loses that appreciative sense of the marvelous, the joy of life dies. Mounds become mere mounds, and mountains only mountains.