us. But one would never have taken him for an ex-lunger. And there is
a wholesomeness about the man, for all his quietness, which draws one
to him. Olga herself still again impressed me as a Zorn etching come
to life, as a Norse myth in petticoats, with the same old largeness of
limb and the same old suggestion of sky-line vastnesses about her. She
still looks as though the Lord had made her when the world was young
and the women of Homer did their spinning in the sunlight. Some
earlier touch of morning freshness is gone from her, it's true, for
you can't move about with four little toddlers in your wake and still
suggest the budding vine. But that morning freshness has been
supplanted by a full and mellow noonday contentedness which is not
without its placid appeal. To her husband, at any rate, she seems
mysteriously perfect. He can still sit and stare at her with a
startlingly uxorious eye. And she, in turn, bathes him in that pale
lunar stare of meditative approval which says plainer than words just
how much her "man" means to her.

Percy and his family stayed overnight with us and hit the trail again
yesterday morning. An old friend of Percy's from Brasenose has taken a
parish some forty odd miles south of Buckhorn--a parish, by the way,
which ought to shake a little of the Oxford dreaminess out of his
system--and Olga and her husband are "packing" their newly-arrived
Toddler Number Four down to the new curate to have him christened.

We were all a bit shy and constrained, during our first hour together
but this soon wore away. It wasn't long before Olga's offspring and
mine were fraternizing together, over-running the bathroom tub and
emptying our water-tank, and making a concerted attack on one of
Dinky-Dunk's self-binders, which would have been dismantled in short
order, if Percy hadn't gone out to investigate the cause of the sudden
quiet.

"My boy loves everything with wheels," explained the proud Olga, in
extenuation of her Junior's oil-blackened fingers.

That brought me up short, for I was on the point of making the same
statement about my Dinkie. After thinking it over, in fact, I realized
that _every_ normal boy loves everything with wheels. And it began to
dawn on me that there was nothing so extraordinary, after all, in my
son's fondness for machinery. I began to see that he was merely one of
a very wide-spread clan, when, an hour later, the entire excited six
united in playing Indian about the hays