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—you don't remember those days, do you? Do you remember anything at all about your father?"

"A little," Jock answered. "That he liked baseball—funny a detail like that should stick in my craw!—and that he was all the time writing at a desk. I have a vague idea what he looked like, too, but perhaps I got that from pictures."

"Probably. You were only eight. Well, he was a dear and splendid person, your father, but dreamy, unpractical—a poet, with everything that the, term is always supposed to mean and usually doesn't." She contemplated Jock with musing eyes. "You're his son, of course, dear; not mine. You have his temperament—most sedulously coated over with undergraduate varnish, but it's there."

Jock would have repudiated this, as he perversely did any such penetrative reference; but he saw that his mother was not really thinking of him at all, except as the twig of the tree. So he said nothing, waiting with eagerness. These facts about his father were impressing him enormously. "Keys to me," he told himself.

Mrs. Hamill continued. "It is odd, your recalling about baseball, because I think baseball was absolutely the only usual, rational, man-in-the-street thing that ever interested him. Why, he—but no matter. The point I'm getting at is, he wasn't the sort who ever made money, or ever would have. When he died he left me with you to bring up, and nothing whatever to do it on—but nerve!"

She sat upright, and rid her feet of their slippers in two quick kicks, muttering "Drat the things!" so humanly that Jock barely suppressed a shout of laughter. He sent an affectionate glance after her as she padded into the adjoining room. Such a peach! . . .