“Our house is where my mother is. There is a river where our house is. Don’t you like to sail in a boat on a river? I’m going to take another piece.” And with a roguish, though hesitating smile, she began to insert her dimpled hand into the bag.
The stranger was looking upon the ground, and heeded neither the smile nor the movement against the bag.
“Where do you go in your boat?”
She mentioned the name of a neighbor of my grandfather’s, across the river from her home.
“And where else?”
Another of our neighbors. The stranger repeated the two names with satisfaction.
“And where else?”
He never once lifted his eyes from the pavement; and there was a sort of suppressed eagerness in his voice that thrilled us all with a strange excitement, we knew not why.
“We sail in our boat to see Uncle Tom.” [Many of the young people in our neighborhood called my grandfather by this name.]
“Oh, you mean your Uncle Tom—let me see,”—and a faint smile illumined his face,—“you mean your Uncle Tom—Mulligins?”