One of the most bromidic performances that human beings indulge in anywhere from their thirty-fifth to eightieth years is to sigh, look wise, and make this remark:  “If I could only begin life over again, knowing what I do now!”

I’m never going to be impressed by that again, and I’m going to answer straight out from the shoulder, “Well, it would be a great strain to you if you found yourself doing it.”

That was about what my entry into life at Elmnest, Riverfield, Harpeth, was, and in many places it rubbed and hurt my pride; in many places at many times it sapped my courage; in many ways it pruned and probed into my innermost being with a searching knife to see if I really did have any intelligence or soul, and at all times it left me with a feeling of just having been sprouted off the cosmic.  I know what I mean, but it doesn’t sound as if I did.  This is the way most of it happened to me in my first six weeks of life in the rustic.

How did I know that when you cleaned up a house that hadn’t been cleaned up for about fifteen years you must wait for ten days after you came to that realization for a sunshiny day, and carry all the beds out in the yard before you began, and that no matter how much awful dust and cobwebs you swept and mopped out or how much old furniture you polished until it reflected your face, it was all perfectly futile unless the bed-sunning ceremony had been first observed?  Just how were the ability to speak French in the most exclusive circles of Parisian society and a cultivated knowledge of every picture-gallery in the world going to keep me from making a blunder that would put me down in Mrs. Pennie Addcock’s mind as a barbarian?

“Why, Mrs. Tillett and me have been getting ready all along to come and help you beat and sun the beds the first sunshiny day and then turn to with our buckets and mops and brooms.  Now you’ve gone and done the wrong thing by all this polishing before a single bed had been beat and aired.”  As she spoke Mrs. Addcock surveyed my house, upon which I had spent every waking moment of my muscular strength, assisted by Polly Corn-tassel and sometimes Bud of the blue eyes, but not at all by Rufus, who resented the cleansing process to such an extent that he wrapped up his jaw in a piece of old flannel and retired to the hay-loft when Bud and Polly and I insisted on invading the horrors of his kitchen.

“Oh, my dear Mrs. Addcock, won’t you and Mrs. Tillett please forgive me for being so ignorant and help me do it to-day?” I pleaded as I picked up a small Tillett, who was peeping soft wooing at me from where he balanced himself on uncertain and chubby legs against his mother’s skirts.

“Well, in this case there is just nothing else to do, but turn to on the beds now, wrong end first, but next year you’ll know,” she answered me with indulgent compromise in her voice.  “And I guess we’ll find some broom and mop work yet to be done.  Come on, Mrs. Tillett.  I guess Nancy can mind the baby all right while we work.”