He went to the children and kissed Sally and whispered in her ear and passed on into the house.  The children walked over to me.

“Hello, Bart!” said Sally.

“Hello!” I answered.

“Wouldn’t you like to play with us?”

I shook my head.

Some of them began to whisper and laugh.  I remember how beautiful the girls looked with their flowing hair and ribbons and pretty dresses.  What happy faces they had!  I wonder why it all frightened and distressed me so.

In a moment my friend came out with Mrs. Dunkelberg, who kissed me, and asked me to tell how I happened to be there.

“I just thought I would come,” I said as I twisted a button on my coat, and would say no more to her.

“Mr. Wright, you’re going to take him home, are you?” Mrs. Dunkelberg asked.

“Yes.  I’ll start off with him in an hour or so,” said my friend.  “I am interested in this boy and I want to see his aunt and uncle.”

“Let him stay here with us until you’re ready to go.”

“I don’t want to stay here,” I said, seizing my friend’s hand.

“Well, Sally, you go down to the office and stay with Bart until they go.”

“You’d like that wouldn’t you?” the man asked of me.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“That means yes,” said the man.

Sally and another little girl came with us and passing a store I held back to look at many beautiful things in a big window.

“Is there anything you’d like there, Bart?” the man asked.

“I wisht I had a pair o’ them shiny shoes with buttons on,” I answered in a low, confidential tone, afraid to express, openly, a wish so extravagant.

“Come right in,” he said, and I remember that when we entered the store I could hear my heart beating.

He bought a pair of shoes for me and I would have them on at once, and that made it necessary for him to buy a pair of socks also.  After the shoes were buttoned on my feet I saw little of Sally Dunkelberg or the other people of the village, my eyes being on my feet most of the time.

The man took us into his office and told us to sit down until he could write a letter.

I remember how, as he wrote, I stood by his chair and examined the glazed brown buttons on his coat and bit one of them to see how hard it was, while Sally was feeling his gray hair and necktie.  He scratched along with his quill pen as if wholly unaware of our presence.

Soon a horse and buggy came for us and I briefly answered Sally’s good-by before the man drove away with me.  I remember telling him as we went on over the rough road, between fields of ripened grain, of my watermelon and my dog and my little pet hen.

I shall not try to describe that home coming.  We found Aunt Deel in the road five miles from home.  She had been calling and traveling from house to house most of the night, and I have never forgotten her joy at seeing me and her tender greeting.  She got into the buggy and rode home with us, holding me in her lap.  Uncle Peabody and one of our neighbors had been out in the woods all night with pine torches.  I recall how, although excited by my return, he took off his hat at the sight of my new friend and said: