The old gentleman is very rich, but he loves to live around with his relatives, not because he’s stingy, but simply because he likes them and knows they are good listeners.

Uncle Peter is a reformed money-maker.  He wrote the first Monopoly that ever made faces at a defenceless public.  He was the owner of the first Trust ever captured alive, and he fed it on government bonds and small dealers till it grew tame enough to eat out of a pocketbook.

Uncle Peter sat down on a rock overhanging the clay bank which sloped up about four feet above the lazy brooklet.  He carefully arranged his expensive rod, placed his fish basket near by and entered into a dissertation on angling that would make old Ike Walton get up and leave the aquarium.

In the meantime Tacks decided to do some bait fishing, so with an old case knife he sat down behind Uncle Peter and began to dig under the rock for worms.

“Fishing is the sport of kings,” the old man chuckled; “an it’s a long eel that won’t turn when trodden upon.  If you’re not going to fish, John, do sit down!  You’re throwing a shadow over the water and that scares the finny monsters.  A fish diet is great for the brain, John!  You should eat more fish.”

“There’s many a true word spoken from the chest,” I sighed, just as Uncle Peter made his first cast and cleverly wound about eight feet of line around a spruce tree on the opposite bank.

The old man began to boil with excitement as he pulled and tugged in an effort to untangle his line, and just about this time Tacks became the author of another spectacular drama.

In the search for the elusive worm that feverish youth known as Tacks the Human Catastrophe, had finally succeeded in prying the rock loose and immediately thereafter Uncle Peter dropped his rod with a yell of terror and proceeded to follow the man from Cook’s.

[Illustration:  Tacks—­the Boy Disaster.]

The rock reached the brook first, but the old gentleman gave it a warm hustle down the bank and finished a close second.  He was in the money, all right.

Tacks also ran—­but in an opposite direction.

For some little time my spluttering relative sat dumfounded in about two feet of dirty water, and when finally I dipped him out of the drink he looked like a busy wash-day.  Everything was damp hut his ardor.

However, with characteristic good nature he squeezed the water out of his pockets and declared that it was just the kind of exercise he needed.  He made me promise not to tell Aunt Martha, because she was very much opposed to his going in bathing on account of the undertow.  Then I sneaked him up to his room and left him to change his clothes.

On the piazza I found Clara J., her face shrouded in the after-glow of a wintry sunset.

She handed me a telegram minus the envelope and asked me, with a voice that was intended to be cuttingly sarcastic, “Is there any answer?”