was sent away.  That’s the thing which makes me fighting furious with Billy sometimes.  He doesn’t say things.  He does them.  I wasn’t afraid of that horse and was going to keep on riding her, but the next day there was no Lady-Bird to ride.  The reason he sent her away was I wouldn’t promise not to ride her.  Our summer homes are on adjoining places and Horson, their stableman, a nice, drinky old person, lets me take out anything I want, anything of Billy’s, and, knowing he couldn’t trust Horson any more than me, he lent Lady-Bird to a man miles and miles away and I never saw her again until she was a tame old thing I did not want to ride.  Billy behaves as if I were a child!

And then the very next winter I fell through the ice and he had to jump in and get me out.  He told me not to go to a certain part of the lake.  He had been all over it and tried it before I got my skates on, but I forgot and went.  A boy was with me, a skunky little rat, who, when he saw the ice was cracking, tried to pull me back, and then he let go my hand and flop I went in and flop came Billy behind me while the little Fur Coat stood off and bawled for help and said afterward he didn’t know how to swim.  Having on heavy clothes, I went down quick and was hard to get up, and I would be an angel this minute if Billy hadn’t been there.  But Billy is always there, which is what makes this summer so queer.  He isn’t here.

On account of servants and things his mother didn’t want to open their country place this year, and my mother didn’t want to open hers, so two houses are closed.  That means a scatteration for both families and is why I am here and Billy in Europe; and if he is having as good a time as I am he isn’t grunting at the change.  He didn’t want to go to Europe.  His father made him.  His mother and two sisters needed a man along and, as Mr. Sloane couldn’t go, Billy had to, and he was a great big silent growl when he went off.  I wasn’t.  I wanted to come to Twickenham Town.  We had passed through it once on our way to Florida and I have been crazy to come back ever since, and when I found Mother was going with Florine and Jessica to a splashy place I didn’t want to go to I begged her to let me come here and board with Miss Susanna Mason and—­glory be—­she let me do it!

She is a sort of relation, Miss Susanna is, a farback one, but nothing is too far back to claim here, and everybody who is anybody is kin to one another, or kin to some one else’s kin, which makes for sociableness, and I am having a perfectly grand time.  In all the world there isn’t another place like the one I am in this summer, and I am getting so familiar with a new kind of natural history that maybe some day I will be an authority on it.  Ancestry is the chief asset of Twickenham Town, and though you speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not ancestors it profiteth you nothing.  That is, among the natives.  Being an outsider,