Emerging from the woods where everything seemed to be flying and singing, the four children approached the old houses of Gone-Away from the rear. In the weedy wastes that had once been gardens or back yards were relics left from an earlier day: the vine-trapped sleigh behind the Humboldt house, clothes posts silvered by a thousand weathers, the slatted skeleton of an old lawn swing. Some of the fences remained, half lost in weeds, with many of their pickets missing, like giant combs with broken teeth.
"Look, the barn swallows are nesting in Judge Chater's house again this year!"
"Swallows hate to change their habits," Julian said. "They're worse than grownups."
The fork-tailed birds, azure-blue in the sunlight, swooped and curved in and out of the tottering cupola that crowned the decaying mansion. They used the air as fishes use a river; they seemed to swing and spin effortlessly on invisible currents.
"If I had to be a bird, I'd be a swallow," Foster said. "They have the best time flying. They look as if they do."
"If you were a bird, you'd have to eat bugs," Davey told him. "You'd have to eat worms. You'd like to eat worms. Oig. If anybody told me I had to be a bird, I wouldn't."
At the Tuckertown house they set their burdens down on the front doorstep. They had decided before getting down to work to pay a call first to Mr. Payton, because his house was nearest, and then to Mrs. Cheever.
"Because it's the polite thing to do," Julian said, his courteous Gone-Away manners descending on him like a mantle.
"And anyway because we want to," Foster added.
"Check."