It was Columbus sometimes; sometimes it was Captain Cook; to-day, it was no less than Jason sailing after the golden fleece.

Out of odd volumes in the garret, and out of “best books” taken down from the secretary in the “settin’-room,” and put into their hands, with charges, of a Sunday, to keep them still, they had got these things, jumbled into strange far-off and near fantasies in their childish minds.  “Lake Ontario” included and connected all.

“I’ll tell you what it is,” said Marcus, tumbling up against the parlor door and an idea at once.  “In here!”

“What?” asked Luke, breathless, without looking up, and paddling with the shovel, from an inverted rocking-chair.

“The golden thing!  Hush!”

At this moment Grashy came into the kitchen, took a little tin kettle from a nail over the dresser, and her sun-bonnet from another behind the door, and made her way through the apartment as well as she could for bristling chair-legs, with exemplary placidity.  She was used to “Lake Ontario.”

“Don’t get into any mischief, you Apostles,” was her injunction.  “I’m goin’ down to Miss Ruddock’s for some ’east.”

“Good,”; says Mark, the instant the door was shut “Now this is Colchis, and I’m going in.”

He pronounced it much like “cold-cheese,” and it never occurred to him that he was naming any unusual or ancient locality.  There was a “Jason” in the Mills Village.  He kept a grocer’s shop.  Colchis might be close by for all he knew; out beyond the wall, perhaps, among the old barrels.  Children place all they read or hear about, or even all they imagine, within a very limited horizon.  They cannot go beyond their world.  Why should they?  Neither could those very venerable ancients.

“’Tain’t,” says Luclarion, with unbeguiled practicality.  “It’s just ma’s best parlor, and you mustn’t.”

It was the “mustn’t” that was the whole of it.  If Mark had asserted that the back kitchen, or the cellar-way closet was Colchis, she would have indorsed it with enthusiasm, and followed on like a loyal Argonaut, as she was.  But her imagination here was prepossessed.  Nothing in old fable could be more environed with awe and mystery than this best parlor.

“And, besides,” said Luclarion, “I don’t care for the golden fleece; I’m tired of it.  Let’s play something else.”

“I’ll tell you what there is in here,” persisted Mark.  “There’s two enchanted children.  I’ve seen ’em!”

“Just as though,” said Luke contemptuously.  “Ma ain’t a witch.”

“Tain’t ma.  She don’t know.  They ain’t visible to her. She thinks it’s nothing but the best parlor.  But it opens out, right into the witch country,—­not for her.  ’Twill if we go.  See if it don’t.”

He had got hold of her now; Luclarion could not resist that.  Anything might be true of that wonderful best room, after all.  It was the farthest Euxine, the witch-land, everything, to them.