“Sir,” said Titus, intensely, “the other evening I was walking with grandfather. We passed a tiny house in the suburbs. A boy was nailing away at a box and whistling like a good fellow. We stopped and spoke to him. He was making a house for his rabbits out of two big soap boxes—and, by the way, they were Hittaker soap boxes; I saw the name. When we left him my grandfather said, ‘Do you suppose you are any happier than that boy?’
“‘No, sir,’ I said, ‘I don’t.’
“Then my grandfather went on: ‘Don’t run away with the idea that no happiness can exist in cottages. The contented mind makes its own dwelling.’”
Mr. Hittaker gazed in an uninterested way at a box of sawdust. He was too old, and too self-centered, and too absent-minded, to be moved by Titus’s eloquence; and then, when he had been a boy, he had had no wise grandfather to train his youthful mind. A grasping, miserly father had made a grasping, miserly son.
Titus broke off with a slight shrug of his shoulders. He was half pitiful, half inimical to his visitor. “Come into the house, sir,” he said, hospitably. “I can leave these birds now. Perhaps the time won’t seem so long if you are looking at grandfather’s books.”
Mr. Hittaker did not care for reading. The most interesting books to him were account books. However, he followed Titus willingly enough.
CHAPTER XXVIII
The Judge Reviews His Family
Weeks and months flew by. Spring passed, summer came and went, autumn followed, then winter and Christmas and the Christmas holidays.
It was just one year since the Judge and Titus had found Bethany trotting along Broadway. It was considerably over a year since the adoption of the pigeon princess into the family, and she was now a fully matured bird.
She sat in her basket by the fireside. Higby had just been in and carefully arranged the wire screen, so that no sparks from the wood fire should fly out on her.