piping his delicate tune from the garden wall was welcome as birdsong in a churchyard had been after service on Sundays handicapped by the litany.
"Would you like to see me shoot at something?" Harold went on, hastily cramming his mouth with slugs.
"Not now, dear," said Hilda, hastily. "Uncle John is tired. And don't eat sweets just before lunch."
"Well, it wouldn't tire him to see me shoot at something. And I'm not eating sweets. I'm getting ready to load."
"Let the poor child shoot if he wants to," Grandma put in.
Harold beamed ferociously through his spectacles, took a slug from his mouth, fitted it into the air-gun, and fired, bringing down two leaves from an espalier pear. Everybody applauded him, because everybody felt glad that it had not been a window or perhaps even himself; the robin cocked his tail contemptuously and flew away.
"And now I must go and get ready for lunch," said John, who thought a second shot might be less innocuous, and was moreover really hungry. His bedroom, dimity draped, had a pleasant rustic simplicity, but he decided that it wanted living in: the atmosphere at present was too much that of a well-recommended country inn.
"Yes, it wants living in," said John to himself. "I shall put in a good month here and break the back of Joan of Arc."
"What skin is this, Uncle John?" a serious voice at his elbow inquired. John started; he had not observed Harold's scout-like entrance.
"What skin is that, my boy?" he repeated in what he thought was the right tone of avuncular jocularity and looking down at Harold, who was examining with myopic intensity the dressing-case. "That is the skin of a white elephant."
"But it's brown," Harold objected.
John rashly decided to extend his facetiousness.
"Yes, well, white elephants turn brown when they're shot, just as lobsters turn red when they're boiled."
"Who shot it?"
"Oh, I don't know—probably some friend of the gentleman who keeps the shop where I bought it."
"When?"
"Well, I can't exactly say when—but probably about three years ago."
"Father used to shoot elephants, didn't he?"
"Yes, my boy, your father used to shoot elephants."
"Perhaps he shot this one."
"Perhaps he did."
"Was he a friend of the gentleman who keeps the shop where you bought it?"
"I shouldn't be surprised," said John.
"Wouldn't you?" said Harold, skeptically. "My father was an asplorer. When I'm big I'm going to be an asplorer, too; but I sha'n't be friends with shopkeepers."
"Confounded little snob," John thought, and began to look for his nailbrush, the address of whose palatial residence of pigskin only Maud knew.
"What are you looking for, Uncle John?" Harold asked.
"I'm looking for my nailbrush, Harold."
"Why?"
"To clean my nails."
"Are they dirty?"
"Well, they're just a little grubby after the railway journey."
"Mine aren't," Harold affirmed in a lofty tone. Then after a minute he added: "I thought perhaps you were looking for the present you brought me from America."
John turned pale and made up his mind to creep unobserved after lunch into the market town of Galton and visit the local toyshop. It would be an infernal nuisance, but it served him right for omitting to bring presents either for his nephew or his niece.
"You're too smart," he said nervously to Harold. "Present time will be after tea." The sentence sounded contradictory somehow, and he changed it to "the time for presents will be five o'clock."
"Why?" Harold asked.
John was saved from answering by a tap at the door, followed by the entrance of Mrs. Curtis.
"Oh, Harold's with you?" she exclaimed, as if it were the most surprising juxtaposition in the world.
"Yes, Harold's with me," John agreed.
"You mustn't let him bother you, but he's been so looking forward to your arrival. When is Uncle coming, he kept asking."
"Did he ask why I was coming?"
Hilda looked at her brother blankly, and John made up his mind to try that look on Harold some time.
"Have you got everything you want?" she asked, solicitously.
"He hasn't got his nailbrush," said Harold.
Hilda assumed an expression of exaggerated alarm.
"Oh dear, I hope it hasn't been lost."
"No, no, no, it'll turn up in one of the glass bottles. I was just telling Harold that I haven't really begun my unpacking yet."
"Uncle John's brought me a present from America," Harold proclaimed in accents of greedy pride.
Hilda seized her brother's hand affectionately.
"Now you oughtn't to have done that. It's spoiling him. It really is. Harold never expects presents."
"What a liar," thought John. "But not a bigger one than I am myself," he supplemented, and then he announced aloud that he must go into Galton after lunch and send off an important telegram to his agent.
"I wonder … " Hilda began, but with an arch look she paused and seemed to thrust aside temptation.
"What?" John weakly asked.
"Why … but no, he might bore you by walking too slowly. Harold," she added, seriously, "if Uncle John is kind enough to take you into Galton with him, will you be a good boy and leave your butterfly net at home?"
"If I may take my air-gun," Harold agreed.
John rapidly went over in his mind the various places where Harold might be successfully detained while he was in the toyshop, decided that the risk would be too great, pulled himself together, and declined the pleasure of his nephew's company on the ground that he must think over very carefully the phrasing of the telegram he had to send, a mental process, he explained, that Harold might distract.
"Another day, darling," said Hilda, consolingly.
"And then I'll be able to take my fishing-rod," said Harold.
"He is so like his poor father," Hilda murmured.
John was thinking sympathetically of the distant Amazonian tribe that had murdered Daniel Curtis, when
