Aunt Rachel wrote to Granma that they would be glad to have me come over to Halton for a visit.
Granma let me, after I had pleaded for a long while,—but it was with great reluctance, warning me of Phoebe.
Aunt Rachel, Uncle Joshua, Cousin Phoebe and cousin Paul lived in a big, square barn-like structure. Its unpainted, barren bulk sat uneasily on top of a bare hill where the clay lay so close to the top-soil that in wet weather you could hardly labour up the precipitous path that led to their house, it was so slippery.
As I floundered upward in the late spring rain, gaining the bare summit under the drizzly sky, a rush of dogs met me. They leaped and slavered and jumped and flopped and tumbled and whined all about me and over me ... ten of them ... hound dogs with flop-ears and small, red-rimmed eyes ... skinny creatures ... there was no danger from them; but they planted their mud-sticky paws everywhere in a frenzy of welcome.
"A hound ain't got no sense onless he's a-huntin'," drawled Paul, as his great boot caught them dextrously under their bellies and lifted them gently, assiduously, severally, in different directions from me....
Aunt Rachel's face, ineffably ignorant and ineffably sweet, lit up with a smile of welcome. She met me in the doorway, kissed me.
And she made me a great batch of pancakes to eat, with bacon dripping and New Orleans molasses ... but first—
"Josh, where on earth is them carpet slippers o' yourn?"
Josh yawned. He knocked the tobacco out of his pipe leisurely ... then, silent, he began scraping the black, foul inside of the bowl ... then at last he drawled.