Say, Ted, did I ever tell you about the time your grandfather and grandmother went to the Philadelphia Exposition and left me at Uncle Nate's?
You never saw Uncle Nate; but I don't know as you need feel peeved about it. Anyway, Uncle Nate had whiskers like a Bolshevik, and catarrh. He was a powerful conscientious man, except in a horse dicker, when he shed his religion like a snake does his skin.
Uncle Nate lived over at Epping Four Corners, six miles from our farm, and owing to his judgment of horse flesh he was about as popular there as General Pershing would be at a Red meeting.
I landed at Uncle Nate's at noon, and by six o'clock he had asked me four times if I was a good boy, and I could tell by the look in his eye that he'd ask me that a dozen times more before I went to bed.
Along about seven it began to grow dark and I began to miss my mother. Uncle Nate sat in a rocking chair in the dining room with his feet on the stove, chewing fine cut and reading a farm journal, and I sat in a small chair with my feet on the floor, reading the "Pruno Almanac" and chewing my fingers.
He said nothing, and I said the same. After a while I got so blame lonesome I stole out on the back steps and stood there wishing I was dead or in jail, or something equally pleasant.
Gosh all hemlock! I was homesick. Then I remembered Sandy, our hired man, was still at the farm. I pointed my nose toward home and skedaddled and, believe me, I went some until I hit the woods just below the intervale, where the wind was soughing through those tall pines like invisible fingers plucking on Old Nick's harp. It sure was the lonesomest place I had ever been in; but the thought of Uncle Nate drove me on until I came to where the old Shaker graveyard runs down close to the road.
I'd forgotten the graveyard until just as I got up to it a white, shapeless figure jumped into the road and ran toward me, waving its arms.