Uncle Henry’s face had become thoughtful, and now he stepped down from the porch, and strolled down the boards to the dock. There he stood craning his neck backward and looking up, until the children had once more finished the verse, laughing and clapping. Evidently the applause for themselves was not enough this time, for there was no encore.
Peter, his eye on Uncle Henry, flopped down on his back and began gazing upward, too. In a moment he called,
“Uncle Hen?”
“Yes, Pete,” from the dock, where Uncle Henry was star-gazing in the opposite direction.
“Why do they call ‘the big dipper’ the ‘great bear’—and is there any ‘little dipper’? Betty says there isn’t, ’cause she never saw it.”
Uncle Henry stepped off the dock upon the smooth sand, kneeled down, and without answering began collecting little smooth pebbles.
Peter sat up and asked in surprise,
“Don’t you know, Uncle Hen?”
Surely this genius, who could make new kinds of kites, and willow-whistles that “worked fine,” was not going to fail now. The other children turned to him, expectant too. Betty herself was willing to be proved wrong about the existence of the “little dipper,” rather than admit a limit to Uncle Henry’s wisdom.
“Let’s make a nice, smooth place on the sand,” said Uncle Henry, his hands now full of those mysterious pebbles. These he put into his pocket and began, on all fours, to smooth sand industriously.