But Dolly had her moments.  One sunny summer afternoon while she grazed peacefully in the orchard, with her reins wound around the whip handle—­the appropriate place on these occasions—­she was evidently stung by a bee.  My brother was at the time regaling himself in a near-by blackberry thicket.  He looked up at an unusual sound.  Without warning, Dolly had leaped to action and was tearing around the orchard dragging the phaeton behind her.  She wrecked the top on a low hanging branch, then hit another tree, severing thereby all connection between herself and the phaeton, and at last galloped down the lane to the farm house, with the broken shafts and harness dangling behind her.  Kipling’s dun “with the mouth of a bell and the heart of Hell and the head of the gallows-tree,” could hardly have shown more spirit.  It was as though one brief minute of a glorious youth had come back to her.  It was a last spurting of an old flame before it sunk to ash.

My grandfather gave his leisure to his grandchildren.  He carved for us with his knife, with an especial knack for willow whistles.  He showed us the colors that lay upon the world when we looked at it through one of the glass pendants of the parlor chandelier.  He sat by us when we played duck-on-the-rock.  He helped us with our kites and gave a superintendence to our toys.  It is true that he was superficial with tin-tags and did not know the difference in value between a Steam Engine tag—­the rarest of them all—­and a common Climax, but we forgave him as one forgives a friend who is ignorant of Persian pottery.  He employed us as gardeners and put a bounty on weeds.  We watered the lawn together, turn by turn.  When I was no more than four years old, he taught us to play casino with him—­and afterwards bezique.  How he cried out if he got a royal sequence!  With what excitement he announced a double bezique!  Or if one of us seemed about to score and lacked but a single card, how intently he contended for the last few tricks to thwart our declaration!  And if we got it despite his lead of aces, how gravely he squinted on the cards against deception, with his glasses forward on his nose!

When he took his afternoon nap and lay upon his back on the sofa in the sitting-room, we made paper pin-wheels to see whether his breath would stir them.  This trick having come to his notice by a sudden awakening, he sometimes thereafter played to be asleep and snored in such a mighty gust that the wheels spun.  He was like a Dutch tempest against a windmill.

If a Dime Museum came to town we made an afternoon of it.  He took us to all the circuses and gave us our choice of side-shows.  We walked up and down before the stretches of painted canvas, balancing in our desire a sword-swallower against an Indian Princess.  Most of the fat women and all the dwarfs that I have known came to my acquaintance when in company with my grandfather.  As a young man, it was said, he once ran away from home to join a circus as an