are with people sometimes, and I wish some-
body had made me behave."

"We aren't through with you, yet," they
warned me. They produced a photograph
taken just before I went away to college; a
tall youth in striped trousers and a straw hat,
trying to look easy and jaunty.

"Tell us, Mr. Burden," said Charley,
"about the rattler you killed at the dog-town.
How long was he? Sometimes mother says
six feet and sometimes she says five."

These children seemed to be upon very
much the same terms with Antonia as the
Harling children had been so many years
before. They seemed to feel the same pride in
her, and to look to her for stories and enter-
tainment as we used to do.

It was eleven o'clock when I at last took
my bag and some blankets and started for the
barn with the boys. Their mother came to
the door with us, and we tarried for a moment
to look out at the white slope of the corral and
the two ponds asleep in the moonlight, and the
long sweep of the pasture under the star-
sprinkled sky.

The boys told me to choose my own place
in the haymow, and I lay down before a big

[[396]]

p395 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p396w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p397

v?