acrobat, having acquired the trick of leaping upon a running horse.  I fancy that his knack of throwing us to his shoulder by a double somersault was a recollection of his early days.  You may imagine with what awe we looked on him even though he now went on crutches.  He was the epitome of adventure, the very salt of excitement.  It was better having him than a pirate in the house.  When the circus had gone and life was drab, he was our tutor in the art of turning cart-wheels and making hand-stands against the door.

And once, when we were away from him, he walked all morning about the garden and in his loneliness he gathered into piles the pebbles that we had dropped.

I was too young to know my grandfather in his active days when he was prominent in public matters.  His broader abilities are known to others.  But though more than twenty years have passed since his death, I remember his tone of voice, his walk, his way of handling a crutch, all his tricks of speech and conduct as though he had just left the room.  And I can think of nothing more beautiful than that a useful man who has faced the world for seventy years and has done his part, should come back in his old age to the nursery and be the playfellow of his grandchildren.

But the best holiday was a trip to the farm.

This farm—­to which in our slow trot we have been so long a time in coming—­lay for a mile on the upper land, and its grain fields and pastures looked down into the valley.  The buildings, however, were set close to the road and fixed their interest on such occasional wagons as creaked by.  A Switzer occupied the farm, who owned, in addition to the more immediate members of his family, a cuckoo clock whose weights hung on long cords which by Saturday night reached almost to the floor.  When I have sat at his table, I have neglected cheese and the lesser foods, when the hour came near, in order not to miss the cuckoo’s popping out.  And in the duller spaces, when the door was shut, I have fancied it sitting in the dark and counting the minutes to itself.

The Switzer’s specialty was the making of a kind of rubber cheese which one could learn to like in time.  Of the processes of its composition, I can remember nothing except that when it was in the great press the whey ran from its sides, but this may be common to all cheeses.  I was once given a cup of this whey to drink and I brightened, for until it was in my mouth, I thought it was buttermilk.  Beyond was the spring-house with cans of milk set in the cool water and with a trickling sound beneath the boards.  From the spring-house there started those mysterious cow-paths that led down into the great gorge that cut the farm.  Here were places so deep that only a bit of the sky showed and here the stones were damp.  It was a place that seemed to lie nearer to the confusion when the world was made, and rocks lay piled as though a first purpose had been broken off.  And to follow a cow-path, regardless of where it led, was, in those days, the essence of hazard; though all the while from the pastures up above there came the flat safe tinkling of the bells.