"Father!" remonstrated his little daughter, blushing, "it's a great many years since I called it anything but coffee-pot."
"But before that?" persisted cousin Ethan.
"Possi-tot!"
And everybody but Emmie laughed as if it were the finest jest in the world.
After breakfast they all walked about the grounds in a body, John Gano pointing out the superiority of his trees, and Ethan indicating his best-beloved old haunts, the two girls exchanging looks of amazement that he should know their playground so intimately. Ethan was much struck by the general dilapidation. If Uncle Elijah—peace to his ashes!—had found cause to remark nearly twenty years before that the place was going to ruin, there was good ground for the assertion to-day.
Ethan remembered the wilderness as being inexorably confined to that vast region (pitifully shrunken to the older eye) below the second flight of stone steps. But "Mr." Hall, who had mowed and clipped and gardened the upper region, having joined the ghosts, for whom he had felt so little fellowship here on earth, the wilderness had risen in his absence and howled, mounting terrace after terrace, and was now laying open siege to the very Fort itself. To be sure, there were garden borders under the front windows, where John Gano lingered with a tender solicitude, lamenting for the Eschscholtzia's sake the lack of sun. But the flourishing and carefully tended pansy border marked only the more definitely the surrounding desolation.
"There's a strange dog!" said Mrs. Gano. "Some one has left the gate open."
"He may have got in down there where there's a picket missing in the fence," said Ethan.
"Oh, that picket hasn't been there for ages," Val answered; "but the old hundred-leaved rose-bushes are so thick in that corner, and so thorny, nothing can get past."