s lived with
him and day by day unearthed his little idiosyncrasies. She may seem
close to him, in those earlier days of romance, but she never really
knows him, any more than a sparrow on a telegraph wire knows the Morse
Code thrilling along under its toes! Men have so many little kinks and
turns, even the best of them. I tacked oil-cloth on a shoe-box and
draped chintz around it, and fixed a place for Dinky-Dunk to wash, in
the bedroom, when he comes in at noon. At night I knew it would be
impossible, for he's built a little wash-house with old binder-carrier
canvas nailed to four posts, and out there Olie and he strip every
evening and splash each other with horse-pails full of well-water.
Dinky-Dunk is clean, whatever he may be, but I thought it would look
more civilized if he'd perform his limited noonday ablutions in the
bedroom. He did it for one day, in pensive silence, and then sneaked the
wash-things back to the rickety old bench outside the door. He said it
saved time.

Among other vital things, I've found that Dinky-Dunk hates burnt toast.
Yesterday morning, Matilda Anne, I got thinking about Corfu and Ragusa
and you, and it _did_ burn a little around the edges, I suppose. So I
kissed his ear and told him carbon would make his teeth white. But he
got up and went out with a sort of "In-this-way-madness-lies"
expression, and I felt wretched all day. So this morning I was more
careful. I did that toast just to a turn. "Feast, O Kaikobad, on the
blondest of toast!" I said as I salaamed and handed him the plate. He
wrinkled up his forehead a little, at the sting in that speech, but he
could not keep from grinning. Then, too, Dinky-Dunk always soaps the
back of his hand, to wash his back, and reach high up. So do I. And on
cold mornings-he says "One, two, three, the bumble bee!" before he hops
out of bed--and I imagined I was the only grownup in all the wide world
who still made use of that foolish rhyme. And the other day when he was
hot and tired I found him drinking a dipperful of cold water fresh from
the well. So I said:

"Many a man has gone to his sarcophagus
Thro' pouring cold water down a warm esophagus!"

When I recited that rhyme to him he swung about as though he'd been
shot. "Where did you ever hear that?" he asked. I told him that was
what Lady Agatha always said to me when she caught me drinking
ice-water. "I thought I was the only man in the world who knew that
crazy old couplet," he confes