"If you go I can't play checkers, an' it's downright mean. What do you care about little girls? They ain't any good."
"But this little girl has got a drunken father."
"Well, you won't see him anyway, so what is the use?"
"She lives in a big house an' it's got a big garden—as big as that!" I stretched out my arms in a vain attempt to impress his imagination, but he merely looked scornful and swore a mighty vow that he'd "be jiggered if he'd keep on playin' nurse-girl to a muff."
At the time he put my pleading sternly aside, but a couple of hours later, when the afternoon was already waning, he relented sufficiently to take me out on the ragged hill, which was covered thickly with pokeberry, yarrow, and stunted sumach. Before our feet the ground sank gradually to the sparkling river, and farther away I could see the silhouette of an anchored vessel etched boldly against the rosy clouds of the sunset.
As I stood there, holding fast to his hand, in the high wind that blew up from the river, a stout gentleman, leaning heavily on a black walking-stick, with a big gold knob at the top, came panting up the slope and paused beside us, with his eyes on the western sky. He was hale, handsome, and ruddy-faced, with a bunch of iron-grey whiskers on either cheek, and a vivacious and merry eye which seemed to catch at a twinkle whenever it met mine. His rounded stomach was spanned by a massive gold watch-chain, from which dangled a bunch of seals that delighted my childish gaze.
"It's a fine view," he observed pleasantly, patting my shoulder as if I were in some way responsible for the river, the anchored vessel, and the rosy sunset. "I moved up-town as soon as the war ended, but I still manage to crawl back once in a while to watch the afterglow."
"Where does the sun go," I asked, "when it slips way down there on the other side of the river?"
The gentleman smiled benignly, and I saw from his merry glance that he did not share my mother's hostility to the enquiring mind.
"Well, I shouldn't be surprised if it went to the wrong side of the world for little boys and girls over there to get up by," he replied.