'It’s your birthday, old chap,' he said, putting his arm around Wilbur. 'I thought you might like a new ball.'
He felt Wilbur trembling slightly and wondered whether, in spite of the little fellow’s seemingly perfect health, he could be an over-strung and nervous child.
'Now you have two balls,' Aunt Susan said fatuously, rocking herself in her old rocker.
'Yes’m,' said Wilbur.
From the security of his immense felicity he smiled at her kindly, very kindly, very indulgently, for how could she understand?
BABANCHIK
BY CHRISTINA KRYSTO
I
IT was my smallest brother who called him that, because, at the time of their meeting, he could not manage the whole of his very long name. But his friends took it up presently, liking the ridiculous yet oddly caressing sound of it, until all who knew him well knew him only as Babanchik.
I remember him first as a chance guest in my father’s house by the side of the Black Sea—a big, deep-chested man in a badly wrinkled pongee suit, who missed his train because we children had drawn him into a game of hide-and-seek. I can still hear his laughter-filled voice demanding fiercely, 'Where are they? Where are they?' as he flung himself about the room, making wide détours to avoid our feet, which protruded from under the cloth-hung table, while the train, with his car attached, paused a moment at the 'half station' at the far end of the pasture and went roaring on along the shore. He stayed the night with us, and our child-world changed forthwith.
During the two years which followed, the play-times of Babanchik and his children were inextricably bound with ours, and the distance between our homes grew very short. At Christmas we danced around the scintillating tree in his spacious Tiflis house, and at Easter he helped us with the beating of the innumerable eggs which go into the Easter bread of Russia, spattering the kitchen wall most dreadfully.