"You were the funniest boy, Bertram," she tells me, "always making believe that it was old England in Grassy Ford, and that you were Robin Hood or Lord Somebody or Earl Somebody Else. How father used to laugh at you! He said it was a pity you would never be knighted, and once he drew for you your escutcheon—you don't remember? Well, it had three books upon it—Tom Brown's School-days, Tales of a Grandfather, and the Morte d'Arthur."
Then I remind her that Robin Saxeholm was half to blame for my early failure as an American. He was a Devonshire lad; he had been a Harrow boy, and was a Cambridge man when he came, one summer of my boyhood, to Grassy Ford to visit the Primroses. His father had been the doctor's dearest friend when they were boys together in Devonshire, and when young Robin's five-feet-eleven filled up the poet's doorway, Letitia tells me, the tears ran down the doctor's cheeks and he held out both his arms to him:
"Robin Saxeholm!—you young Devon oak, you—tell me, does the Dart still run?"
"He does, sir!" cried the young Englishman, speaking, Letitia says, quite in the Devon manner, for those who dwell upon the banks of that famous river find, it seems, something too human in its temper and changeful moods to speak of it in the neuter way.
They sat an hour together, the poet and his old friend's son, before Letitia could show the guest to the room she had prepared for him.
That was a summer!
Robin taught me a kind of back-yard, two-old-cat cricket with a bat fashioned by his own big hands. Sometimes Letitia joined us, and the doctor watched us from his chair rolled out upon the garden walk, applauding each mighty play decorously, in the English fashion, with clapping hands. Robin Goodfellow, the doctor called our captain, "though a precious large one, I'll be bound," he said. Letitia called him Mr. Saxeholm, first—then Mr. Robin, and sometimes, laughingly, Mr. Bobbin—then Robin. I called him Mr. Bob.
I made up my mind to one thing then and there: I should be happier when I grew old enough to wear white cricket flannels and a white hat like Mr. Bob's, and I hoped, and prayed too on my knees, that my skin would be as clear and pinkish—yes, and my hair as red. Alas! I had begun all wrong: I was a little beast of a brunette.
I taught Mr. Bob baseball, showed him each hill and dale, each whimpering brook of Grassy Ford, and fished with him among the lilies in shady pools while he smoked his pipe and told me of Cambridge and Harrow-on-the-Hill and the vales of Devon. He had lived once, so he told me, next door to a castle, though it did not resemble Warwick or Kenilworth in the least.
"It was just a cah-sle," said Mr. Bob, in his funny way.