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He could see Uncle Rob with the hayrake in the south mowing, sedately driving the old team and ignoring the visitors.

“I guess he prob’ly thinks we’re bootleggers,” chuckled Sidney. “Come on, you kids! Here’s where your old daddy worked all one summer! Let’s go! … Thirsty? Say, I’ll give you a drink of real spring water—not none of this chlorinated city stuff! And we’ll see the menagerie. ”

Before he had finished, Rob and Willabette had slipped over the rear doors of the car and were looking down into the valley with little sounds of excitement. Sidney whisked out almost as quickly as they, while Mabelle climbed down with the dignity suitable to a dweller in the Bronx. He ignored her. He clucked his children round the house to the spring-fed well and pumped a bucket of water.

“Oh, it’s so cold, Daddy. It’s swell!” said Rob.

“You bet your life it’s cold and swell. Say! Don’t use words like ‘swell’! They’re common. But hell with that! Come on, you brats! I’ll show you something!”

There were kittens, and two old, grave, courteous cats. There was a calf—heaven knows by how many generations it was descended from the calf that on a June morning, when Sidney was sixteen, had licked his fingers. There were ducklings, and young turkeys with feathers grotesquely scattered over their skins like palm trees in a desert, and unexpected more kittens, and an old, brown-and-white, tail-wagging dog, and a pen of excited little pigs.

The children squealed over all of them until Mabelle caught up, puffing a little.

“Well,” she said, “the kits are kind of cute, ain’t they?” Then, darkly: “Now that
you’ve got me here, Sid, with your plans and all!”

Uncle Rob crept up, snarling, “What you folks want? … By gracious, if it ain’t Sid! This your wife and children? Well, sir!”

It was, Sidney felt, the climax of his plot, and he cried to his son, “Rob! This is your granduncle, that you were named for. How’d you like to stay here on the farm instead of in New York?”

“Hot dog! I’d love it! Them kittens and the li’l’ ducks! Oh, they’re the berries! You bet I’d like to stay!”

“Oh, I’d love it!” gurgled his sister.

“You would not!” snapped Mabelle. “With no bathroom?”

“We could put one in,” growled Sidney.

“On what? On all the money you’d make growing orchids and bananas here, I guess! You kids—how’d you like to walk two miles to school, through the snow, in winter?”

“Oh, that would be slick! Maybe we could kill a deer,” said young Rob.

“Yes, and maybe a field mouse could kill you, you dumb-bell! Sure! Lovely! All evening with not a dog-gone thing to do after supper!”

“Why, we’d go to the movies! Do you go to the movies often, Granduncle Rob?”

“Well, afraid in winter you wouldn’t get to go to the movies at all. Pretty far into town,” hesitated Uncle Rob.

“Not—go—to—the—movies?” screamed the city children, incredulous. It was the most terrible thing they had ever heard of.

Rob, Jr. , mourned, “Oh, gee, that wouldn’t be so good! Say, how do the hicks learn anything if they don’t go to the movies? But still, we could go in the summer, Ma, and in the winter it would be elegant, with sliding and hunting and everything. I’d love it!”

Mabelle cooked supper, banging the pans a good deal and emitting opinions of a house that had no porcelain sink, no water taps, no refrigerator, no gas or electricity. She was silent through supper, silent as Sidney, silent as Uncle Rob. But Sidney was exultant. With the children for allies, he would win. And the children themselves, they were hysterical. Until Mabelle screamed for annoyance; they leaped up from the table, to come back with the most unspeakable and unBronxian objects—a cat affectionately carried by his hind leg, but squealing with misunderstanding of the affection, a dead mole, an unwiped oil can, a muck-covered spade.