"With a moat, Mr. Bob?"
"Oh yes, a moat, I dare say—but dry, you know."
"And a drawbridge, Mr. Bob?"
"Well, no—not precisely; at any rate, you couldn't draw it up."
"But a portcullis, I'll bet, Mr. Bob?"
"Well—I cahn't say as to that, I'm sure, Bertram."
He had lived next door to a castle, mind you, and did not know if it had a portcullis! He had never even looked to see! He had never even asked! Still, Mr. Bob was a languid fellow, Bertram Weatherby was bound to admit, even in speech, and drawled out the oddest words sometimes, talking of "trams" and "guards" and "luggage-vans," which did seem queer in a college man, though Bertram remembered he was not a Senior and doubtless would improve his English in due time. Indeed, he helped him, according to his light, and the credit is the boy's that the young Britisher, after a single summer in Grassy Ford, could write from Cambridge to Letitia: "I guess I will never forget the folks in Grassy Ford! Remember me to the little kid, my quondam guide, philosopher, and friend."
Robin was always pleasant with Letitia, helping her with her housework, I remember, wiping her dishes for her, tending her fires, and weeding her kitchen-garden. There never had been so many holidays, she declared, gratefully, and she used to marvel that he had come so far, all that watery way from Devon, yet could be content with such poor fare and such humble work and quiet pleasures in an alien land so full of wonders. Yet it must have been cheerful loitering, for he stayed on, week after week. He had come intending, he confessed, to "stop" but one, but somehow had small hankering thereafter to see, he said, "what is left of America, liking your Grassy Fordshire, Bertram, so very well." Perhaps secretly he was touched by the obvious penury and helplessness of his father's friend, as well as by the daughter's loving and heavy service, so that he stayed on but to aid them in the only unobtrusive way, overpaying them, Letitia says, for what he whimsically called "tuition in the quiet life," as he gently closed her fingers over the money which she blushed to take. Then he would quote for her those lines from Pope:
"... Quiet by day,
Sound sleep by night; study and ease
Together mixt, sweet recreation,
And innocence, which most doth please
With meditation."
He read Greek and Latin with Dr. Primrose, and many an argument of ancient loves and wars I listened to, knowing by the keen-edged feeling of my teeth when the fray was over that my mouth had been wide open all the while. Letitia, too, could hear from the kitchen where she made her pies, for it was a conversational little house, just big enough for a tête-á-tête, as Dr. Primrose used to say, and when debate waxed high, she would stand sometimes in the kitchen doorway, in her gingham apron, wiping the same cup twenty times.