“Want to ride up with me and help drive?” said Grandpa, turning to him suddenly.
Poor Sunny Boy was sorely tempted, but he decided quickly.
“I have to take care of Mother,” he said. “She might be lonesome all alone in the back.”
“No, indeed,” cried Mother instantly. “You ride up there with Grandpa, precious. You were so good not to tease about the taxi. I’ll lean over the seat and talk to you both.”
So Sunny Boy and Grandpa got into the front seat, and Sunny learned that the horses’ names were Paul and Peter, and that they were not afraid of automobiles, and that he could drive them whenever some older person was with him. Paul and Peter trotted briskly along, and Grandpa said they knew they were going home to supper.
They drove through the town, and Sunny Boy thought it looked very cool, and clean, and pretty, after the warm and dusty train. The grass was bright green, and, as Sunny Boy wrote Harriet, “millions and dozens” of robins were singing among the trees. A great red sun was going to bed back of a high dark hill, and Sunny Boy, sitting beside Grandpa and holding the reins while Paul and Peter trotted steadily, thought that the country was the nicest place he had ever been in.
Then, where the road divided, Grandpa took the reins and turned the team to the left. They entered a lane with white-washed fences on either side and tall waving trees like soldiers, which Mrs. Horton said were elms.
“Now, Sunny Boy,” she told him softly, “here’s Brookside.”
Sunny Boy saw an old red brick house with a great white porch across the front and a green lawn all about it. A white picket fence went all around the lawn, and as Grandpa stopped the horses before the gate, three people came out. There was a tall, thin young man who went to the horses’ heads, a little girl with flaming red hair who looked about fourteen years old, and a tall, thin old lady with hair as white and curly as Grandpa’s, who came out to the carriage and took Mother and Sunny Boy both in her arms at once.
“You’re Grandma,” said Sunny Boy.