In the Penniman home it was not merely Sunday morning; it was Sabbath morning.  Throughout the house a subdued bustling, decorous and solemn; a hushed, religious hurry of preparation for church.  In the bathroom Judge Penniman shaved his marbled countenance with tender solicitude, fitting himself to adorn a sanctuary.  In other rooms Mrs. Penniman and Winona arrayed themselves in choice raiment for behoof of the godly; in each were hurried steppings, as from closet to mirror; shrill whisperings of silken drapery as it fell into place.  In the parlour the Merle twin sat reading an instructive book.  With unfailing rectitude he had been the first to don Sabbath garments, and now lacked merely his shoes, which were being burnished by his brother in the more informal atmosphere of the woodshed, to which the Sabbath strain of preparation did not penetrate.

It was the Wilbur twin’s weekly task to do the shoes of himself and brother and those of the judge.  No one could have told precisely why the task fell to him, and he had never thought to question.  The thing simply was.  Probably Winona, asked to wrestle with the problem, would have urged that Merle was always the first one dressed, and should not be expected to submit his Sunday suit to the hazards of this toil.  She would have added, perhaps, that anyway it was more suitable work for Wilbur, the latter being of a rougher spiritual texture.  Also, Merle could be trusted to behave himself in the Penniman parlour, not touching the many bibelots there displayed, or disarranging the furniture, while the Wilbur twin would not only touch and disarrange, but pry into and handle and climb and altogether demoralize.  In all the parlour there was but one object for which he had a seemly respect ­the vast painting of a recumbent lion behind bars.  It was not an ordinary picture, such as may be seen in galleries, for the bars guarding the fierce beast were real bars set into the frame, a splendid conceit that the Wilbur twin never tired of regarding.  If you were alone in the sacred room you could go right up to the frame and feel the actual bars and put your hand thrillingly through them to touch the painted king of the jungle.  But the Merle twin could sit alone in the presence of this prized art treasure and never think of touching it.  He would sit quietly and read his instructive book and not occasion the absent Winona any anxiety.  Wherefore the Wilbur twin each Sabbath morning in the woodshed polished three pairs of shoes, and not uncheerfully.  He would, in truth, much rather be there at his task than compelled to sit in the parlour with his brother present to tell if he put inquiring fingers into the lion’s cage.

He had finished the shoes of his brother and himself, not taking too much pains about the heels, and now laboured at the more considerable footgear of the judge.  The judge’s shoes were not only broad, but of a surface abounding in hills and valleys.  As Dave Cowan said, the judge’s feet were lumpy.  But the Wilbur twin was conscientious here, and the judge’s heels would be as resplendent as the undulating toes.  The task had been appreciably delayed by Frank, the dog, who, with a quaint relish for shoe blacking, had licked a superb polish from one shoe while the other was under treatment.  His new owner did not rebuke him.  He conceived that Frank had intelligently wished to aid in the work, and applauded him even while securing the shined shoes from his further assistance.

But one pagan marred this chastened Sabbath harmony of preparation.  In the little house Dave Cowan lolled lordly in a disordered bed, smoked his calabash pipe beside a disordered breakfast tray, fetched him by the Wilbur twin, and luxuriated in the merely Sunday ­and not Sabbath ­edition of a city paper shrieking with black headlines and spectacular with coloured pictures; a pleasing record of crimes and disasters and secrets of the boudoir, the festal diversions of the opulent, the minor secrets of astronomy, woman’s attire, baseball, high art, and facial creams.  As a high priest of the most liberal of all arts, Dave scanned the noisy pages with a cynical and professional eye, knowing that none of the stuff had acquired any dignity or power to coerce human belief until mere typesetters like himself had crystallized it.  Not for Dave Cowan was the printed word of sacred authority.  He had set up too much copy.  But he was pleased, nevertheless, thus to while and doze away a beautiful Sabbath morning that other people made rather a trial of.

Having finished the last of the judge’s shoes, the Wilbur twin took them and the shoes of Merle to their owners, then hastened with his own to the little house where he must dress in his own Sunday clothes, wash his hands with due care ­they would be doubtingly inspected by Winona ­and put soap on his hair to make it lie down.  Merle’s hair would lie politely as combed, but his own hair owned no master but soap.  Lacking this, it stood out and up in wicked disorder ­like the hair of a rowdy, Winona said.

The rebellious stuff was at last plastered deceitfully to his skull as if a mere brush had smoothed it, and with a final survey, to assure himself that he had forgotten none of those niceties of the toilet that Winona would insist upon, he took his new straw hat and went again to the Penniman house.  For the moment he was in flawless order, as neat, as compactly and accurately accoutred as the Merle twin, to whom this effect came without effort.  But it would be so only for a few fleeting moments.  He mournfully knew this, and so did Winona.  Within five blocks from home and still five blocks from the edifice of worship, while Merle appeared as one born to Sunday clothes and shined shoes and a new hat, the Wilbur twin would be one to whom Sabbath finery was exotic and unwelcome.  The flawless lustre of his shoes would be dulled, even though he walked sedately the safe sidewalk; his broad collar and blue polka-dotted cravat would be awry, one stocking would be down, his jacket yawning, all his magnificence seeming unconquerably alien.  Winona did him the justice to recognize that this disarray was due to no wilfulness of its victim.  He was helpless against a malign current of his being.

He held himself stiff in the parlour until the Pennimans came rustling down the stairway.  He could exult in a long look at the benignant lion back of real bars, but, of course, he could not now reach up to touch the bars.  It would do something to his clothes, even if the watchful and upright Merle had not been there to report a transgression of the rules.  Merle also stood waiting, his hat nicely in one hand.

The judge descended the stairs, monumental in black frock coat, gray trousers, and the lately polished shoes that were like shining relief maps of a hill country.  He carried a lustrous silk hat, which he now paused to make more lustrous, his fingers clutching a sleeve of his coat and pulling it down to make a brush.  The hat was the only item of the judge’s regal attire of which the Wilbur twin was honestly envious ­it was so beautiful, so splendid, so remote.  He had never even dared to touch it.  He could have been left alone in the room with it, and still would have surveyed it in all respect from a proper distance.

Mrs. Penniman came next, rustling in black silk and under a flowered hat that Winona secretly felt to be quite too girlish.  Then Winona from the door of her room above called to the twins, and they ascended the stairway for a last rite before the start for church, the bestowal of perfume upon each.  Winona stood in the door of her room, as each Sunday she stood at this crisis, the cut-glass perfume bottle in hand.  The twins solemnly approached her, and upon the white handkerchief of each she briefly inverted the bottle.  The scent enveloped them delectably as the handkerchiefs were replaced in the upper left pockets, folded corners protruding correctly.  As Wilbur turned away Winona swiftly moistened a finger tip in the precious stuff and drew it across the pale brow of Merle.  It was a furtive tribute to his inherent social superiority.

Winona, in her own silk ­not black, but hardly less severe ­and in a hat less girlish than her mother’s, rustled down the stairs after them.  Speech was brief and low-toned among the elders, as befitted the high moment.  The twins were solemnly silent.  Amid the funereal gloom, broken only by a hushed word or two from Winona or her mother, the judge completed his fond stroking of the luminous hat, raised it slowly, and with both hands adjusted it to his pale curls.  Then he took up his gold-headed ebony cane and stepped from the dusk of the parlour into the light of day, walking uprightly in the pride of fine raiment and conscious dignity.  Mrs. Penniman walked at his side, not unconscious herself of the impressive mien of her consort.

Followed Winona and Merle, the latter bearing her hymn book and at some pains keeping step with his companion.  Behind them trailed the Wilbur twin, resolving, as was his weekly rule, to keep himself neat through church and Sunday-school ­yet knowing in his heart it could not be done.  Already he could feel his hair stiffening as the coating of soap dried upon it.  Pretty soon the shining surface would crack and disorder ensue.  What was the use?  As he walked carefully now he inhaled rich scent from the group ­Winona’s perfume combining but somehow not blending with a pungent, almost vivid, aroma of moth balls from the judge’s frock coat.

They met or passed other family groups, stiffly armoured for the weekly penance to a bewildering puzzle of mortality.  Ceremonious greetings were exchanged with these.  The day was bright and the world all fair, but there could be no levity, no social small talk, while this grim business was on.  They reached the white house of worship, impressive under its heaven-pointing steeple, and passed within its portals, stepping softly to the accompaniment of those silken whisperings, with now and again the high squeak of new boots whose wearers, profaning the stillness, would appear self-conscious and annoyed, though as if silently protesting that they were blameless.

Thus began an hour of acute mental distress for the Wilbur twin.  He sat tightly between Mrs. Penniman and the judge.  There was no free movement possible.  He couldn’t even juggle one foot backward and forward without correction.  The nervous energy thus suppressed rushed to all the surface of his body and made his skin tingle maddeningly.  He felt each hair on his head as it broke away from the confining soap.  Something was inside his collar, and he couldn’t reach for it; there was a poignant itching between his shoulder blades, and this could receive no proper treatment.  He boiled with dumb, helpless rage, having to fight this wicked unrest.  He never doubted its wickedness, and considered himself forever shut out from those rewards that would fall to the righteous who loved church and could sit still there without jiggling or writhing or twisting or scratching.

He was a little diverted from his tortures by the arrival of the Whipples.  From the Penniman pew he could glance across to a side pew and observe a line of repeated Whipple noses, upon which for some moments he was enabled to speculate forgetfully.  Once ­years ago, it seemed to him ­he had heard talk of the Whipple nose.  This one had the Whipple nose, or that one did not have the Whipple nose; and it had then been his understanding that the Whipple family possessed but one nose in common; sometimes one Whipple had it; then another Whipple would have it.  At the time this had seemed curious, but in no way anomalous.  He had readily pictured a Whipple nose being worn now by one and now by another of this family.  He had visualized it as something that could be handed about.  Later had come the disappointing realization that each Whipple had a complete nose at all times for his very own; that the phrase by which he had been misled denoted merely the possession of a certain build of nose by Whipples.

But even this simple phenomenon offered some distraction from his present miseries.  He could glance along the line of Whipple noses and observe that they were, indeed, of a markedly similar pattern.  It was, as one might say, a standardized nose, raised by careful selection through past generations of Whipples to the highest point of efficiency; for ages yet to come the demands of environment, howsoever capricious, would probably dictate no change in its structural details.  It sufficed.  It was, moreover, a nose of good lines, according to conventional canons.  It was shapely, and from its high bridge jutted forward with rather a noble sweep of line to the thin, curved nostrils.  The high bridge was perhaps the detail that distinguished it from most good noses.  It seemed to begin to be a nose almost from the base of the brow.  In a world of all Whipple noses this family would have been remarked for its beauty.  In one of less than Whipple noses ­with other less claimant designs widely popularized ­it might be said that the Whipple face would be noted rather for distinction than beauty.

In oblique profile the Wilbur twin could glance across the fronts in turn of Harvey D. Whipple, of Gideon Whipple, his father; of Sharon Whipple, his uncle; and of Juliana Whipple, sole offspring of Sharon.  The noses were alike.  One had but to look at Miss Juliana to know that in simple justice this should have been otherwise.  She might have kept a Whipple nose ­Whipple in all essentials ­without too pressing an insistence upon bulk.  But it had not been so.  Her nose was as utterly Whipple as any.  They might have been interchanged without detection.

The Wilbur twin stared and speculated upon and mildly enjoyed this display, until a species of hypnotism overtook him, a mercifully deadening inertia that made him slumberous and almost happy.  He could keep still at last, and be free from the correcting hand of Mrs. Penniman or the warning prod of the judge’s elbow.  He dozed in a smother of applied godliness.  He was delighted presently to note with an awakening start that the sermon was well under way.  He heard no word of this.  He knew only that a frowning old gentleman stood in a high place and scolded about something.  The Wilbur twin had no notion what his grievance might be; was sensible only of his heated aspect, his activity in gesture, and the rhythm of his phrases.

This influence again benumbed him to forgetfulness, so that during the final prayer he was dramatizing a scene in which three large and savage dogs leaped upon Frank and Frank destroyed them ­ate them up.  And when he stood at last for the doxology one of his feet had veritably gone to sleep, the one that had been cramped back under the seat, so that he stumbled and drew unwelcome attention to himself while the foot tingled to wakefulness.

The ever-tractable Merle had been attentive to the sermon, had sung beautifully, and was still immaculate of garb, while the Wilbur twin emerged from the ordeal in rank disorder, seeming to have survived a scuffle in which efforts had been made to wrench away his Sunday clothes and to choke him with his collar and cravat.  And the coating of soap had played his hair false.  It stood out behind and stood up in front, not with any system, but merely here and there.

“You are a perfect sight,” muttered Winona to him.  “I don’t see how you do it.”  But neither did the offender.

With a graciously relaxed tension the freed congregation made a leisurely progress to the doors of the church; many lingered here in groups for greetings and light exchanges.  It was here that the Penniman group coalesced with the Whipple group, a circumstance that the trailing Wilbur noted with alarm.  The families did not commonly affiliate, and the circumstance boded ominously.  It could surely not be without purpose.  The Wilbur twin’s alarm was that the Whipple family had regretted its prodigality of the day before and was about to demand its money back.  He lurked in the shadowy doorway.

The Whipples were surrounding Merle with every sign of interest.  They shook hands with him.  They seemed to appraise him as if he were something choice on exhibition at a fair.  Harvey D. was showing the most interest, bending above the exhibit in apparently light converse.  But the Wilbur twin knew all about Harvey D. He was the banker and wore a beard.  He was to be seen on week days as one passed the First National Bank, looking out through slender bars ­exactly as the Penniman lion did ­upon a world that wanted money, but couldn’t have it without some good reason.  He had not been present when the Whipple money was so thoughtlessly loosened, and he would be just the man to make a fuss about it now.  He would want to take it back and put it behind those bars in the bank where no one could get it.  But he couldn’t ever have it back, because it was spent.  Still, he might do something with the spender.

The Wilbur twin slunk farther into friendly shadows, and not until the groups separated and the four Whipples were in their waiting carriage did he venture into the revealing sunlight.  But no one paid him any attention.  The judge and Mrs. Penniman walked up the shaded street, for the Sunday dinner must be prepared.  Winona and the Merle twin, both flushed from the recent social episode, turned back to the church to meet and ignore him.

“Fortune knocks once at every one’s door,” Winona was mysteriously saying.

The Wilbur twin knew this well enough.  The day before it had knocked at his door and found him in.

There was still Sunday-school to be endured, but he did not regard this as altogether odious.  It was not so smothering.  The atmosphere was less strained.  One’s personality could come a bit to the front without incurring penalties, and one met one’s own kind on a social plane ­subject to discipline, it was true, but still mildly enjoyable.  It was his custom to linger here until the classes gathered, but to-day the Whipple pony cart was driven up by the Whipple stepmother and the girl with her hair cut off.  Apparently no one made these two go to church, but they had come to Sunday-school.  And the Wilbur twin fled within at sight of them.  The pony cart, vehicle in which he had been made a public mock, was now a sickening sight to him.

Sunday-school was even less of a trial to him than usual.  The twins were in the class of Winona, and Winona taught her class to-day with unwonted unction; but the Wilbur twin was pestered with few questions about the lesson.  She rather singled Merle out and made him an instructive example to the rest of the class, asking Wilbur but twice, and then in sheerly perfunctory routine:  “And what great lesson should we learn from this?”

Neither time did he know what great lesson we should learn from this, and stammered his ignorance pitiably, but Winona, in the throes of some mysterious prepossession, forgot to reprove him, and merely allowed the more gifted Merle to purvey the desired information.  So the Wilbur twin was practically free to wriggle on his hard chair, to exchange noiseless greetings with acquaintances in other classes, and to watch Lyman Teaford, the superintendent, draw a pleasing cartoon of the lesson with coloured chalk on a black-board, consisting chiefly of a rising yellow sun with red rays, which was the sun of divine forgiveness Once the Wilbur twin caught the eye of the Whipple girl ­whose bonnet hid her cropped hair ­and she surprisingly winked at him.  He did not wink back.  Even to his liberal mind, it did not seem right to wink in a Sunday-school.

When at last they all sang “Bringing in the Sheaves,” and were ably dismissed by Lyman Teaford, who could be as solemn here as he was gay in a parlour with his flute, Winona took the Merle twin across the room to greet the Whipple stepmother and the Whipple girl.  Wilbur regarded the scene from afar.  Winona seemed to be showing off the Merle twin, causing him to display all his perfect manners, including a bow lately acquired.

The Wilbur twin felt no slight in this.  He was glad enough to be left out of Winona’s manoeuvres, for he saw that they were manoeuvres and that Winona was acting from some large purpose.  Unless it wanted its money back, the Whipple family had no meaning for him; it was merely people with the Whipple nose, though, of course, the stepmother did not have this.  He paused only to wonder if the girl would have it when she grew up ­she now boasted but the rudiments of any nose whatsoever ­and dismissed the tribe from his mind.

He waited for Winona and Merle a block up the street from the church.  Winona was silent with importance, preoccupied, grave, and yet uplifted.  Not until they reached the Penniman gate did she issue from this abstraction to ask the Wilbur twin rather severely what lesson he had learned from the morning sermon.  The Wilbur twin, with immense difficulty, brought her to believe that he had not heard a word of the sermon.  This was especially incredible, because it had dealt with the parable of the prodigal son who spent all his substance in riotous living.  One would have thought, said Winona, that this lesson would have come home to one who had so lately followed the same bad course, and she sought now to enlighten the offender.

“And he had to eat with the pigs when his money was all gone,” Merle submitted in an effort to aid Winona.

But the Wilbur twin’s perverse mind merely ran to the picture of fatted calf, though without relish ­he did not like fat meat.

It was good to be back in a human atmosphere once more, where he could hear his father’s quips.  The Penniman Sunday dinner was based notably on chicken, as were all other Sunday dinners in Newbern, and his father, when he entered the house, was already beginning the gayety by pledging Mrs. Penniman in a wineglass of the Ajax Invigorator.  He called it ruby liquor and said that, taken in moderation, it would harm no one, though he estimated that as few as three glasses would cause people to climb trees like a monkey.

The Wilbur twin was puzzled by this and would have preferred that his present be devoted solely to making a new man of Judge Penniman, but he laughed loyally with his father, and rejoiced when Mrs. Penniman, in the character of the abandoned duchess, put her own lips to the glass at his father’s urging.  The judge did not enter into this spirit of foolery, resenting, indeed, that a sound medicinal compound should be thus impugned.  And Winona was even more severe.  Not for her to-day were jests about Madame la Marquise and her heart of adamant.  Dave Cowan tried a few of these without result.

Winona was still silent with importance, or spoke cryptically, and she lavished upon the Merle twin such attention as she could give from her own mysterious calculations.  One might have gathered that she was beholding the Merle twin in some high new light.  The Wilbur twin ate silently and as unobtrusively as he could, for table manners were especially watched by Winona on Sunday.  Not until the blackberry pie did he break into speech, and even then, it appeared, not with the utmost felicity.  His information that these here blackberries had been picked off the grave of some old Jonas Whipple up in the burying ground caused him to be regarded coldly by more than one of those about the table; and Winona wished to be told how many times she had asked him not to say “these here.”  Of course he couldn’t tell her.

Dinner over, it appeared that Winona would take Merle with her to call upon poor old Mrs. Dodwell, who had been bedridden for twenty years, but was so patient with it all.  She loved to have Merle sit by her bedside of a Sunday and tell of the morning’s sermon.  They would also take her a custard.  The Wilbur twin was not invited upon this excursion, but his father winked at him when it was mentioned and he was happy.  He could in no manner have edified the afflicted Mrs. Dodwell, and the wink meant that he would go with his father for a walk over the hills ­perhaps to the gypsy camp.  So he winked back at his father, being no longer in Sunday-school, and was impatient to be off.

In the little house he watched from a window until Winona and Merle had gone on their errand of mercy ­Merle carrying nicely the bowl of custard swathed in a napkin ­and thereupon heartily divested himself of shoes and stockings.  Winona, for some reason she could never make apparent to him, believed that boys could not decently go barefoot on the Lord’s Day.  He did not wish to affront her, but neither would he wear shoes and stockings with no one to make him.  His bare feet rejoiced at the cool touch of the grass as he waited in the front yard for his father.  He would have liked to change his Sunday clothes for the old ones of a better feel, but this even he felt would be going too far.  You had to draw the line somewhere.

His father came out, lighting his calabash pipe.  He wore a tweed cap now in place of the formal derby, but he was otherwise attired as on the previous evening, in the blue coal and vivid waistcoat, the inferior trousers, and the undesirable shoes.  As they went down the street under shading elms the dog, Frank, capered at the end of his taut leash.

They went up Fair Street to reach the wooded hills beyond the town.  The street was still and vacant.  The neat white houses with green blinds set back in their flowered yards would be at this hour sheltering people who had eaten heavily of chicken for dinner and now dozed away its benign effects.  Even song birds had stilled their pipings, and made but brief flights through the sultry air.

Dave Cowan sauntered through the silence in a glow of genial tolerance for the small town, for Dave knew cities.  In Newbern he was but a merry transient; indeed, in all those strange cities he went off to he was but a transient.  So frequent his flittings, none could claim him for its own.  He had the air of being in the world itself, but a transient, a cheerful and observant explorer finding entertainment in the manners and customs of a curious tribe, its foibles, conceits, and quaint standards of value ­since the most of them curiously adhered to one spot even though the round earth invited them to wander.

Sometimes Dave lingered in Newbern ­to the benefit of the Weekly Advance ­for as long as three months.  Sometimes he declared he would stay but a day and stayed long; sometimes he declared he would stay a long time and stayed but a day.  He was a creature happily pliant to the rule of all his whims.  He never bothered to know why he dropped into Newbern, nor bothered to know why he left.  On some morning like other mornings, without plan, he would know he was going and go, stirred by some vagrant longing for a strange city ­and it was so easy to go.  He was unencumbered with belongings.  He had no troublesome packing to do, and took not even the smallest of bags in his farings forth.  Unlike the twins, Dave had no Sunday clothes.  What clothes he had he wore, very sensibly, it seemed to him.  He had but to go on and on, equipped with his union card and his printer’s steel rule, the sole machinery of his trade, and where he would linger he was welcome, for as long as he chose and at a wage ample for his few needs, to embalm the doings of a queer world in type.  Little wonder he should always obey the wander-bidding.

They passed a place where the head of the clan, having dined, had been overtaken with lethargy and in a hammock on his porch was asleep in a public and noisy manner.

“Small-town stuff!” murmured Dave, amiably contemptuous.

The Wilbur twin could never understand why his father called Newbern a small town.  They came to the end of Fair Street, where the white houses dwindled into open country.  The road led away from the river and climbed the gentle slope of West Hill.  The Wilbur twin had climbed that slope the day before under auspices that he now recalled with disgust.  Beyond, at the top of the hill, its chimneys lifted above the trees and its red walls showing warmly through the cool green of its shading foliage, was the Whipple New Place.  To the left, across the western end of the little town and capping another hill, was the Whipple Old Place, where dwelt Sharon Whipple and his daughter, Juliana.  The walls of the Whipple Old Place were more weathered, of a duller red.  The two places looked down upon the town quite as castles of old looked down upon their feudatories.

“I was right inside that house yesterday,” said the Wilbur twin, pointing to the Whipple New Place and boasting a little ­he would not have to reveal the dreadful details of his entry.  “Right inside of it,” he added to make sure that his father would get all his importance.  But the father seemed not enough impressed.

“You’ll probably go into better houses than that some day,” he merely said, and added:  “You learn a good trade like mine and you can always go anywhere; always make your good money and be more independent than Whipples or even kings in their palaces.  Remember that, Sputterboy.”

“Yes, sir,” said Wilbur.

His father never addressed the Merle twin by any but his rightful name, nor did he ever address the other by the one the dead mother had affixed to him, miscalling him by a number of titles, among which were Sputterboy, Gig, Doctor, and Bill.

Before ascending quite to the Whipple New Place they left the dusty road for a path that led over a lawnlike stretch of upland, starred with buttercups and tiny anémones, and inhabited by a colony of gophers that instantly engaged Frank, the dog, now free of his leash, in futile dashes.  They stood erect, with languidly drooped paws, until he was too near; then they were inexplicably not there.  Frank at length divined that they unfairly achieved these disappearances by descending into caverns beneath the surface of the earth.  At first, with frantic claws and eager squeals, he tore at the entrances to these until the prey appeared at exits farther on, only to repeat the disappearance when dashed at.  Frank presently saw the chase to be hopeless.  It was no good digging for something that wouldn’t be there.

“There’s life for you, Doctor,” said Dave Cowan.  “Life has to live on life, humans same as dogs.  Life is something that keeps tearing itself down and building itself up again; everybody killing something else and eating it.  Do you understand that?”

“Yes, sir,” said Wilbur, believing he did.  Dogs killed gophers if they caught them, and human beings killed chickens for Sunday dinners.

“Humans are the best killers of all,” said Dave.  “That’s the reason they came up from monkeys, and got civilized so they wear neckties and have religion and post offices and all such.”

“Yes, sir,” said Wilbur.

They climbed to a green height and reclined on the cool sward in the shade of a beech tree.  Here they could pick out the winding of the quick little river between its green banks far below, and look across the roofs of slumbrous Newbern.  The Wilbur twin could almost pick out the Penniman house.  Then he looked up, and low in the sky he surprisingly beheld the moon, an orb of pale bronze dulled from its night shine.  Never before had he seen the moon by day.  He had supposed it was in the sky only at night.  So his father lectured now on astronomy and the cosmos.  It seemed that the moon was always there, or about there, a lonesome old thing, because there was no life on it.  Dave spoke learnedly, for his Sunday paper had devoted a page to something of this sort.

“Everything is electricity or something,” said Dave, “and it crackles and works on itself until it makes star dust, and it shakes this together till it makes lumps, and they float round, and pretty soon they’re big lumps like the moon and like this little ball of star dust we’re riding on ­and there are millions of them out there all round and about, some a million times bigger than this little one, and they all whirl and whirl, the little ones whirling round the big ones and the big ones whirling round still bigger ones, dancing and swinging and going off to some place that no one knows anything about; and some are old and have lost their people; and some are too young to have any people yet; but millions like this one have people, and on some they are a million years older than we are, and know everything that it’ll take us a million years to find out; but even they haven’t begun to really know anything ­compared with what they don’t know.  They’ll have to go on forever finding out things about what it all means.  Do you understand that, Bill?”

“Yes, sir,” said Wilbur.

“Do you understand how people like us get on these whirling lumps?”

“Yes, sir,” said Wilbur.

“How do they?”

“No, sir,” said Wilbur.

“Well, it’s simple enough.  This star dust shakes together, and pretty soon some of it gets to be one chemical and some of it gets to be another, like water and salt and lime and phosphorus and stuff like that, and it gets together in little combinations and it makes little animals, so little you couldn’t see them, and they get together and make bigger animals, and pretty soon they have brains and stomachs ­and there you are.  This electricity or something that shook the star dust together and made the chemicals, and shook the chemicals together and made the animals ­well, it’s fierce stuff.  It wants to find out all about itself.  It keeps making animals with bigger brains all the time, so it can examine itself and write books about itself ­but the animals have to be good killers, or something else kills them.  This electricity that makes ’em don’t care which kills which.  It knows the best killer will have the best brain in the long run; that’s all it cares about.  It’s a good sporty scheme, all right.  Do you understand that, Doctor?”

“Yes, sir,” said Wilbur.

“Everything’s got a fair chance to kill; this power shows no favours to anything.  If gophers could kill dogs it would rather have gophers; when microbes kill us it will rather have microbes than people.  It just wants a winner and don’t care a snap which it is.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Of course, now, you hear human people swell and brag and strut round about how they are different from the animals and have something they call a soul that the animals haven’t got, but that’s just the natural conceit of this electricity or something before it has found out much about itself.  Not different from the animals, you ain’t.  This tree I’m leaning against is your second or third cousin.  Only difference, you can walk and talk and see.  Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” said Wilbur.  “Couldn’t we go up to the gypsy camp now?”

Dave refilled the calabash pipe, lighted it, and held the match while it burned out.

“That fire came from the sun,” he said.  “We’re only burning matches ourselves ­burning with a little fire from the sun.  Pretty soon it flickers out.”

“It’s just over this next hill, and they got circus wagons and a fire where they cook their dinners, right outdoors, and fighting roosters, and tell your fortune.”

Dave rose.

“Of course I don’t say I know it all yet.  There’s a catch in it I haven’t figured out.  But I’m right as far as I’ve gone.  You can’t go wrong if you take the facts and stay by ’em and don’t read books that leave the facts to one side, like most books do.”

“Yes, sir,” said Wilbur, “and they sleep inside their wagons and I wish we had a wagon like that and drove round the country and lived in it.”

“All right,” said his father.  “Stir your stumps.”

They followed the path that led up over another little hill winding through clumps of hazel brush and a sparse growth of oak and beech.  From the summit of this they could see the gypsy camp below them, in an open glade by the roadside.  It was as the Wilbur twin had said:  there were gayly-painted wagons ­houses on wheels ­and a campfire and tethered horses and the lolling gypsies themselves.  About the outskirts loafed a dozen or so of the less socially eligible of Newbern.  Above a fire at the camp centre a kettle simmered on its pothook, being stirred at this moment by a brown and aged crone in frivolous-patterned calico, who wore gold hoops in her ears and bangles at her neck and bracelets of silver on her arms ­bejewelled, indeed, most unbecomingly for a person of her years.

The Wilbur twin would have lingered on the edge of the glade with other local visitors, a mere silent observer of this delightful life; he had not dreamed of being accepted as a social equal by such exalted beings.  But his father stalked boldly through the outer ring of spectators to the camp’s centre and genially hailed the aged woman, who, on first looking up from her cookery, held out a withered palm for the silver that should buy him secrets of his future.

But Dave Cowan merely preened his beautiful yellow moustache at her and said, “How’s business, Mother?” Whereupon she saw that Dave was not a villager to be wheedled by her patter.  She recognized him, indeed, as belonging like herself to the freemasonry of them that know men and cities, and she spoke to him as one human to another.

“Business been pretty rotten here,” she said as she stirred the kettle’s contents.  “Oh, we made two-three pretty good horse trades ­nothing much.  We go on to a bigger town to-morrow.”

A male gypsy in corduroy trousers and scarlet sash and calico shirt open on his brown throat came to the fire now, and the Wilbur twin admiringly noted that his father greeted this rare being, too, as an equal.  The gypsy held beneath an arm a trim young gamecock feathered in rich browns and reds, with a hint of black, and armed with needle-pointed spurs.  He stroked the neck of the bird and sat on his haunches with Dave before the fire to discuss affairs of the road; for he, too, divined at a glance that Dave was here but a gypsy transient, even though he spoke a different lingo.

The Wilbur twin sat also on his haunches before the fire, and thrilled with pride as his father spoke easily of distant strange cities that the gypsies also knew; cities of the North where summer found them, and cities of the South to which they fared in winter.  He had always been proud of his father, but never so proud as now, when he sat there talking to real gypsies as if they were no greater than any one.  He was quite ashamed when the gypsies’ dog, a gaunt, hungry-looking beast, narrowly escaped being eaten up by his own dog.  But Frank, at the sheer verge of a deplorable offense, implicitly obeyed his master’s command and forbore to destroy the gypsy mongrel.  Again he flopped to his back at the interested approach of the other dog, held four limp paws aloft, and simpered at the stranger.

Other gypsies, male and female, came to the group about the fire, and lively chatter ensued, a continuous flashing of white teeth and shaking of golden ear hoops and rattling of silver bracelets.  The Wilbur twin fondly noted that his father knew every city the gypsies knew, and even told them the advantages of some to which they had not penetrated.  He gathered this much of the talk, though much was beyond him.  He kept close to his father’s side when the latter took his leave of these new friends.  He wanted these people to realize that he belonged to the important strange gentleman who had for a moment come so knowingly among them.

As they climbed out of the sheltering glade he was alive with a new design.  Gypsies notoriously carried off desirable children; this was common knowledge in Newbern Center.  So why wouldn’t they carry off him, especially if he were right round there where they could find him easily?  He saw himself and his dog forcibly conveyed away with the caravan ­though he would not really resist ­to a strange and charming life beyond the very farthest hills.  He did not confide this to his father, but he looked back often.  They followed a path and were soon on a bare ridge above the camp.

Dave Cowan was already talking of other things, seeming not to have been ever so little impressed with his reception by these wondrous people, but he had won a new measure of his son’s respect.  Wilbur would have lingered here where they could still observe through the lower trees the group about the campfire, but Dave Cowan seemed to have had enough of gypsies for the moment, and sauntered on up the ridge, across an alder swale and out on a parklike space to rest against a fence that bounded a pasture belonging to the Whipple New Place.  Across this pasture, in which the fat sorrel pony grazed and from which it regarded them from time to time, there was another grove of beech and walnut and hickory, and beyond this dimly loomed the red bulk of the Whipple house and outbuildings.  There was a stile through the fence at the point where they reached it, and Dave Cowan idly lolled by this while the Wilbur twin sprawled in the scented grass at his feet.  He well knew he should not be on the ground in his Sunday clothes.  On the other hand, if the gypsies stole him they would not be so fussy as Winona about his clothes.  None of them seemed to have Sunday clothes.

He again broached the suggestion about a gypsy wagon for himself and his father ­and Frank, the dog ­in which they could go far away, seeing all those strange cities and cooking their dinner over campfires.  His father seemed to consider this not wholly impracticable, but there were certain disadvantages of the life, and there were really better ways.  It seems you could be a gypsy in all essentials, and still live in houses like less adventurous people.

“Trouble with them, they got no trade,” said the wise Dave, “and out in all kinds of weather, and small-town constables telling them to move on, and all such.  You learn a good loose trade, then you can go where you want to.”  A loose trade seemed to be one that you could work at any place; they always wanted you if you knew a loose trade like the printer’s ­or, “Now you take barbering,” said Dave.  “There’s a good loose trade.  A barber never has to look for work; he can go into any new town and always find his job.  I don’t know but what I’d just as soon be a barber as a printer.  Some ways I might like it better.  You don’t have as much time to yourself, of course, but you meet a lot of men you wouldn’t meet otherwise; most of ’em fools to be sure, but some of ’em wise that you can get new thoughts from.  It’s a cleaner trade than typesetting and fussing round a small-town print shop.  Maybe you’ll learn to be a good barber; then you can have just as good a time as those gypsies, going about from time to time and seeing the world.”

“Yes, sir,” said the Wilbur twin, “and cutting people’s hair with clippers like Don Paley clipped mine with.”

“New York, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Omaha, Kansas City, Denver, San Antone,” murmured Dave, and there was unction in his tone as he recited these advantages of a loose trade ­“any place you like the looks of, or places you’ve read about that sound good ­just going along with your little kit of razors, and not having to small-town it except when you want a bit of quiet.”

They heard voices back of them.  Dave turned about and Wilbur rose from the grass.  Across the pasture came the girl, Patricia Whipple, followed at a little distance by Juliana.  The latter was no longer in church garb, but in a gray tweed skirt, white blouse, and a soft straw hat with a flopping brim.  There was a black ribbon about the hat and her stout shoes were of tan leather.  The girl was bare-headed, and Don Paley’s repair of yesterday’s damage was noticeable.  She came at a quickening pace, while Juliana followed slowly.  Juliana looked severe and formidable.  Never had her nose looked more the Whipple nose then when she observed Dave Cowan and his son at the stile.  Yet she smiled humorously when she recognized the boy, and allowed the humour to reach his father when she glanced at him.  Dave and Miss Juliana had never been formally presented.  Dave had seen Juliana, but Juliana had had until this moment no sight of Dave, for though there was in Newbern no social prejudice against a craftsman, and Dave might have moved in its highest circles, he had chosen to consort with the frankly ineligible.  He lifted his cap in a flourishing salute as Juliana and Patricia came through the stile.

“And how are you to-day, my young friend?” asked Juliana of Wilbur in her calm, deep voice.

The Wilbur twin said, “Very well, I thank you,” striving instinctively to make his own voice as deep as Juliana’s.

The girl winked at him brazenly as they passed on.

“Gypsies!” she called, exultantly, and Juliana swept him with a tolerant smile.

Dave Cowan watched them along the path to the ridge above the camp.  Here they paused in most intelligible pantomime.  Patricia Whipple wished to descend to the very heart of the camp, while Juliana could be seen informing the child that they were near enough.  To make this definite she sat upon the bole of a felled oak beside the path while Patricia jiggled up and down in eloquent objection to the untimely halt.  Dave read the scene and caressed his thick moustache with practiced thumb and finger.  His glance was sympathetic.

“The poor old maid!” he murmured.  “All that Whipple money, and she has to be just a small-towner!  Say, I bet no one has ever kissed that old girl since her mother died!  None of these small-town hicks would ever have the nerve to.  Yes, sir; any one’s got a right to be sorry for that dame.  If she had a little enterprise she’d branch out from here and meet a few people.”

“Yes, sir,” said Wilbur.  “But that girl wants to go down to the camp.”

This was plain.  Patricia still danced, while Juliana remained firmly seated.

“I could go take her down,” he continued.

“Why don’t you?” said his father, again stroking the golden moustache in sympathy for the unconscious Juliana.

So it befell that the Wilbur twin shyly approached the group by the felled tree, and the watching father saw the two children, after a moment’s hesitancy on the part of Juliana, disappear from view over the crest of the ridge.  Dave continued to loll by the stile and to watch the waiting Juliana, thinking of gypsies and the pure joy of wandering.  He began to repeat some verses he had lately happened upon, murmuring them to a little mass of white clouds far off against the blue of the summer sky, where the pale bronze moon lonesomely hung.  He liked the words and the moon and gypsies joyously foot-loose, and he again grew sympathetic for Juliana’s small-town plight.  He felt a large pagan tolerance for those warped souls pent in small towns.

After twenty minutes of this he faintly heard a call from Juliana, sent after the children below her.  He saw her stand to beckon commandingly and watch to see if she were obeyed.  Then she turned and came slowly back up the path that would lead to the stile.  Again Dave absently murmured his verses.  Juliana approached the stile, walking briskly now.  She was halted by surprising speech from this rather cheaply debonair creature who looked so nearly like a gentleman and yet so plainly was not.

“Wanted to be off with ’em, didn’t you?” Dave was saying brightly; “off and over the edge of the world, all foot-loose and free as wind, going over strange roads and lying by night under the stars.”

“What?” demanded Juliana sharply.

She studied the fellow’s face for the first time.  He was preening his yellow moustache and flashing a challenge to her from half-shut eyes.

“Small-towners bound to feel it,” he continued, unconscious of any sharpness in Juliana’s “What!” “They want to be off and over the edge of things, but they don’t dare ­haven’t the nerve.  You’d like to, but you don’t dare.  You know you don’t!”

Juliana almost smiled.  The fellow’s face, as she paused beside him at the stile, was set with sheer impudence, yet this was not wholly unattractive.  And amazingly he now broke into verse: 

    We, too, shall steal upon the spring
      With amber sails flown wide;
    Shall drop, some day, behind the moon,
      Borne on a star-blue tide.

He indicated the present moon with flourishing grace as he named it.  Juliana did not gasp, but it might have been a gasp in one less than a Whipple.  But the troubadour was not to be daunted.  Juliana didn’t know Dave Cowan as cities knew him.

    Enchanted ports we, too, shall touch;
      Cadiz or Cameroon;
    Nor other pilot need beside
      A magic wisp of moon.

Again he gracefully indicated our lunar satellite, and again Juliana nearly gasped.

“Of course, you felt it all, watching those people.  I don’t blame you for feeling wild.”

Juliana lifted one of her stout tan boots toward the stile, and Dave with doffed cap extended a hand to assist her through.  Juliana, dazed beyond a Whipple calm for almost the first time in her thirty years, found her own hand perforce upon his.

“You poor thing!” concluded Dave with a swift glance to the ridge where the children had not yet appeared.

Then amazingly he enfolded the figure of the woman in his arms and upon her cold, appalled lips he imprinted a swift but accurate kiss.

“There, poor thing!” he murmured.

He lavished one look upon the still frozen Juliana, replaced the cap upon his yellow hair, once more preened his moustache at her, and turned away to meet the oncoming children.  And in his glance Juliana retained still the wit to read a gay, cherishing pity.  As he turned away she sank limply against the fence, her first sensation being all of wonder that she had not cried out at this monstrous assault.  And very clearly she knew at once that she had not cried out or made any protest because, though monstrous, it was even more absurd.  A seasoned sense of humour had not failed.

The guilty man swaggered on to meet the children, not looking back.  For him the incident was closed.  Juliana, a hand supporting her capable chin, steadily regarded his swaying shoulders and the yellow hair beneath his cap.  In her nostrils was the scent of printer’s ink and pipe tobacco.  She reflectively rubbed her chin, for it had been stung with a day-old beard that pricked like a nettle.  Now she was recalling another woodland adventure of a dozen years before here in this same forest.

Dave Cowan had been wrong when he said that no one had kissed her since her mother died.  Once on a winter’s day, when she was sixteen, she had crossed here, bundled in a red cloak and hood, and a woodchopper, a merry, laughing foreigner who spoke no English, had hailed her gayly, and she had stopped and gayly tried to understand him, and knew only that he was telling her she was beautiful.  She at least had thought it was that, and was certain of it when he had seized and kissed her, laughing joyously the while.  She had not told any one of that, but she had never forgotten.  And now this curious creature, whom she had not supposed to be gallantly inclined ­unshaven, smelling of printer’s ink and tobacco!

“I’m coming on!” said Juliana aloud, and laughed rather grimly.

She watched her prankling blade meet the children and go off down the ridge with his son, still not looking back.  She thought it queer he did not look back at her just once.  She soothed her chin again, sniffing the air.

Patricia Whipple came leaping up the path, excited with an imminent question.  She halted before the still-reflective Juliana and went at once to the root of her matter.

“Cousin Juliana, what did that funny man kiss you for?”

This time Juliana in truth did gasp.  There was no suppressing it.

“Patricia Whipple ­and did that boy see it, too?”

“No, he was too far behind me.  But I did.  I saw it.  I was looking right at you, and that funny man ­all at once he grabbed you round your waist and he ­”

“Patricia, dear, listen!  We must promise never to say anything about it ­never to anybody in the world ­won’t we, dear?”

“Oh, I won’t tell if you don’t want me to, but what ­”

“You promise me ­never to tell a soul!”

“Of course!  I promise ­cross my heart and hope to die ­but what did he do it for?”

Juliana tried humorous evasion.

“Men, my dear, are often tempted by women to such lengths ­tempted beyond their strength.  Your question isn’t worded with all the tact in the world.  Is it so strange that a man should want to kiss me?”

“Well, I don’t know” ­Patricia became judicial, scanning the now flushed countenance of Juliana ­“I don’t see why not.  But what did he do it for?”

“My dear, you’ll be honest with me, and never tell; so I’ll be honest with you.  I don’t know ­I really don’t know.  But I have an awful suspicion that the creature meant to be kind to me.”

“He looks like a kind man.  And he’s the father of the boy that I wore his clothes yesterday when I was running away, and the father of that other boy that was with him and that I’m going to have one of for my very own brother, because Harvey D. and grandpa said something of that kind would have to be done, so what relation will that make us to this man that was so kind to you?”

“None whatever,” said Juliana, shortly.  “And never forget your promise not to tell.  Come, we must go back.”

They went on through the pasture.  The shadows had lengthened and the moon already glowed a warmer bronze.  Juliana glanced at it and murmured indistinctly.

“What is it?” asked Patricia.

“Nothing,” said Juliana.  But she had been asking herself:  “I wonder where he gets his verses?”

Her hand went again to her chin.