After the burial Josh and Paul went on back to Halton, where they worked in the Steel Mills.  They left Aunt Rachel and Phoebe to stay on and pay us a visit.

Paul and Josh were “puddlers”—­when they worked ... in the open furnaces that were in use in those days ... when you saw huge, magnificent men, naked to the belt, whose muscles rippled in coils as they toiled away in the midst of the living red of flowing metal.

* * * * *

Phoebe was wild and beautiful in a frail way.  She wore a pea green skirt and a waist of filmy, feminine texture.  We instantly took to each other.  She was always up and off, skimming swallow-like in all directions, now this way, now that, as if seeking for some new flavour in life, some excitement that had not come to her yet.

We made expeditions together over the country.  She joined me in my imaginary battles with Indians ... my sanguinary hunts for big game....  It was she who first taught me to beg hand-outs at back doors—­one day when we went fishing together and found ourselves a long way off from home.

Once Phoebe fell into a millpond from a springboard ... with all her clothes on ... we were seeing who dared “teeter” nearest the end....  I had difficulty in saving her.  It was by the hair, with a chance clutch, that I drew her ashore.

The picture of her, shivering forlornly before the kitchen stove!  She was beautiful, even in her long, wet, red-flannel drawers that came down to her slim, white ankles.  She was weeping over the licking her mother had given her.

* * * * *

“I’m afraid your cousin Phoebe will come to no good end some day, if she don’t watch out,” said my grandmother to me, “and I don’t like you to play with her much....  I’m going to have Aunt Rachel take her home soon” ... after a pause, “as sure as I have ten fingers she’ll grow up to be a bad woman.”

* * * * *

“Granma, what is a bad woman?”

* * * * *

Aunt Rachel and Cousin Phoebe returned home.  Uncle Josh, that slack old vagabond with his furtive, kindly eye-glances, came for them with a livery rig.

* * * * *

I think I read every dime novel published, during those years of my childhood ... across the bridge that Elton had helped build, the new bridge that spanned the Hickory River, and over the railroad tracks, stood a news-stand, that was run by an old, near-sighted woman.  As she sat tending counter and knitting, I bought her books ... but for each dime laid down before her, I stole three extra thrillers from under her very eye.

From my grandfather’s library I dug up a book on the Hawaiian Islands, written by some missionary.  In it I found a story of how the natives speared fish off the edges of reefs.  Straightway I procured a pitchfork.