“It’s this way.  I’m pretty nearly used up, not good for much any more.  And the Electrical Company wanted to fix everything the nicest way for me to live.  And they have.  I hadn’t any idea anything could be so nice as living next door to you folks in such a place as Crittenden’s.  And then making friends with you.  I’d always wanted a little boy, but I thought I was so old, no little boy would bother with me.”

He squeezed the child’s fingers and looked down on him lovingly.  For a moment Paul’s heart swelled up so he couldn’t speak.  Then he said, in a husky voice, “I like to.”  He took a large bite from his sandwich and repeated roughly, his mouth full, “I like to.”

Neither said anything more for a moment.  The flicker . . . yes, it was a flicker . . . in the big beech kept changing her position, flying down from a top-branch to a lower one, and then back again.  Paul made out the hole in the old trunk of the tree where she’d probably put her nest, and wondered why she didn’t go back to it.

“Have you got to the Civil War, in your history yet, Paul?”

“Gee, yes, ’way past it.  Up to the Philadelphia Exposition.”

Mr. Welles said nothing for a minute and Paul could see by his expression that he was trying to think of some simple baby way to say what he wanted to.  Gracious! didn’t he know Paul was in the seventh grade? “I can understand all right,” he said roughly.

Mr. Welles said, “Well, all right.  If you can, you’ll do more than I can.  You know how the colored people got their freedom then.  But something very bad had been going on there in slavery, for ever so long.  And bad things that go on for a long time, can’t be straightened out in a hurry.  And so far, it’s been too much for everybody, to get this straightened out.  The colored people . . . they’re made to suffer all the time for being born the way they are.  And that’s not right . . . in America . . .”

“Why don’t they stand up for themselves?” asked Paul scornfully.  He’d like to see anybody who would make him suffer for being born the way he was.

Mr. Welles hesitated again.  “It looks to me this way.  People can fight for some things . . . their property, and their vote and their work.  And I guess the colored people have got to fight for those, themselves.  But there are some other things . . . some of the nicest . . . why, if you fight for them, you tear them all to pieces, trying to get them.”

Paul did not have the least idea what this meant.

“If what you want is to have people respect what you are worth, why, if you fight them to make them, then you spoil what you’re worth.  Anyhow, even if you don’t spoil it, fighting about it doesn’t put you in any state of mind to go on being your best.  That’s a pretty hard job for anybody.”

Paul found this very dull.  His attention wandered back to that queer flicker, so excited about something.