"So I got a lot of pepper, and one day when Polly was going to sweep I scattered it around the house. I rubbed it well into the carpets."
He scraped his foot over the floor to show me just how he did it. For the moment he looked about ten years old.
"I rubbed it in quite hard. It didn't show. Nobody could tell that there was anything wrong until she began to sweep. Well, Rhoda, if you could have heard her sneeze, it would have done you good. She sneezed for hours. At first they thought that Polly had a new kind of sickness. They went flying for the doctor; but my mother had noticed me laugh, and she pounced on me. She shook the truth out of me."
He trembled with laughter at the recollection.
"But what did they do to you, granddad?" I asked, breathlessly.
Sometimes his story would have an anticlimax.
"They put me down in the big black cellar," he declared, impressively.
I rubbed my head against his shoulder. I felt that I could never have treated him in that way if I had been his mother.
"Poor granddad," I said, in a consoling whisper. "They were not good to you!"
He puffed out his cheeks, and his eyes shone.