mmon enough to Triassic regions; and as you stand
at the back door and look westward the sky comes down and touches our
cabbages, fifty yards away. It does, really!

Well, we were talking of him and incidentally of the Fourth Chair, when
the children came round the corner of the house and, finding us there,
stood looking at us.

That is all; just stood staring at us, with feet planted firmly on the
gravel, hands in pockets and an expression of unwinking candour in their
young eyes. It was absurd, of course, that we three grown-ups should
have been so embarrassed by a couple of urchins, but we were. The cool
nerve of it, the unimaginable audacity of it, took our breath away. It
was almost as though they were saying, "Well, and what are you doing
here, hey?" There was something almost indelicate in their merciless
scrutiny. We quailed.

There was, moreover, a deeper reason for our disquietude. We realized,
afterward, that those children, one dark and one fair, had been quite
unconscious of our existence before. Numberless times they had passed
us, even crossing our land on a short cut to the forest road, but
without recognition. And though, in a pause between two absorbing
interests, in a moment of disengagement from the more important matters
of American childhood, they now deigned to favour us with their frank
attention, it was rather disparagement than curiosity they exhibited. We
now know the feelings of a Living Wonder in a show.

"Hello," remarked the elder, the dark one, dispassionately, and we
almost jumped. The other child fixed his eye on my slippers, which were
of carpet and roomy. It seemed to me that the time had come to tell them
of their lack of good manners.

"Hello, little boy," I replied. I decided to approach the subject of
manners circuitously.

"You ain't so very big yerself," said the elder boy, quite without
emotion and merely as a stated fact. I admit freely that this, in the
jargon of the streets, was "one on me." My general diminutiveness of
person has always been more than compensated, I think, by a
corresponding magnitude of mind; but one is none the less sensitive to
wayside ribaldry. I have never been able to quench a certain
satisfaction in the fact that the children who mocked the prophet were
devoured by bears. An occasional example is certainly wholesome, if only
to bring young people to their senses.

"You mustn't speak like that," I said, gently. "What is your name?"

"What yo