It was understood that the abandonment of teaching had been caused by failing health and to the same origin was perhaps due the reserve and apparent preoccupation that militated against any real intimacy with his nephew's young friends. There was some vague story of a young wife who had died years before, but an experience of that sort was so far beyond our comprehension that the rumor added but little to the isolation in which Raymond's uncle seemed to dwell. He was never really an actor in the drama of our young lives. Sometimes appearing in the wings, more often in the critic's seat, he was an onlooker rather than a participant.

One remembers him chiefly as walking back and forth on the old street between Raymond's grandfather's house and certain indefinite rooms he dwelt in which were probably in the edifice then known as the Charter Oak building.

The impression that persists is of one very carefully wrapped up against the weather. He wore a long ulster, a seal-skin cap, with a visor, and about his neck, under his iron-gray beard, a muffler was efficiently disposed. His large, gold-rimmed spectacles gave him the customary owlish, peering expression, but in spite of them he could not seem to recognize us, or any one else, except when close at hand. He carried a stout walking stick, the point of which he never raised from the ground, but dragged after him between alternate steps and he stood so straight that he appeared to lean a little backward. It would seem that in the warmer seasons this habitual manner of dress must have been modified, but there is no recollection of any other costume.

A tradition of immense learning clung about him. It was said that in his mysterious rooms the walls were lined with books which he spent all his time in reading. It was even whispered that he read Latin and Greek for fun—and no higher intellectual achievement than this could be imagined. There was something facile and careless, too, about the idea of reading for pleasure dead languages with which we had as yet no acquaintance but which loomed as educational obstacles in the not distant future. This casual facility appealed to our youthful sporting spirit and compelled a reluctant admiration. Whatever Raymond's uncle's shortcomings as an intimate might be, he had at least reached the point where matters that were soon to be weighty problems to us were to him merely a question of amusement.

Raymond's grandparents lived in an old house around the corner from the old street. Their home was, in fact, one of the oldest houses in the city. They were people of wealth for that day and the house had been brought up to date in the fashion of that time when the finer harmonies of the antique were not as yet appreciated. Plate glass windows had replaced the small panes, hard wood floors covered the fine oak planking and varnished inside shutters had supplanted the dignified panelling of the originals. But our aesthetic appreciations, like those of our elders, noticed no incongruity. To us the old house was the acme of contemporary good taste, as well as the abode of comfort and even luxury.

It was here that Raymond's grandparents gave their annual Christmas party for their grandson and his friends. This was a festival famous in the young life of that neighborhood. Its celebrity was chiefly due to the Gargantuan amount of delightful food available. There was a tree, of course, but the presents were of the edible, rather than the permanent kind, and no less appreciated on that account. Nowhere else was there to be found such an amount and variety of candy, fruit, ice cream, cake, nuts, raisins, chicken salad, sandwiches, jellies, jams, pÂtÉ de foies gras, and other pleasing forms of nourishment—to say nothing of lemonade and various kinds of "shrub"—as at Raymond's Christmas party. At the close of each of these events it did not seem that we could ever eat again, yet there was a certain assurance of the continuance of the fÊte in carrying home a paper bag containing an orange, an apple and a generous selection of sweets.

After the assembly had been fed there were games—"Drop the Handkerchief," "Still Pond, No More Moving," that perennial juvenile pastime where the participants chant the memorable chorus beginning "Oats, peas, beans and barley grow," and sometimes, much against the sentiments of the boys, that embarrassing game where the player who became "It" was compelled to "Bow to the wittiest, kneel to the prettiest and kiss the one you love best." The boys decided early in their social experience that no self-respecting male ought to play this game and it soon fell into disrepute, though the girls fought for its continuance for a time.

Youthful spirits rise with food as rapidly as does a thermometer under the sun's rays and a good deal of noise and romping invariably accompanied these games. Raymond's dear old grandfather and grandmother enjoyed all these manifestations of young life as keenly, so far as we could see, as did the children themselves, but Uncle Horace, it was evident, did not like noise and confusion. Memory pictures him standing in the background of the party, as in the background of life, a quiet spectator, blinking shortsightedly but not unkindly, through his big spectacles, and vanishing altogether as the excitement increased.

Once one of the youthful guests, while the festivities were at their height, wandered into a remote part of the house in search of some accessory required for an approaching game and entered by a rear door a room where Uncle Horace had been reading. He had put his book down in his easy chair and was now discovered standing in the other doorway, his back to the room.

An intense curiosity to look at one of Uncle Horace's learned volumes took possession of the interloper and at that age it did not occur to him that delicacy might demand some hesitation. He tiptoed over to the chair expecting to see on the cushion some calf-bound, ancient tome written in characters that were hieroglyphics to him. But a complete reversal of his ideas about Uncle Horace was at hand. The book that lay there was in blue-and-gold cloth binding and was a copy of the first edition of "Huckleberry Finn."

The intruder looked in some astonishment at the spare figure of Raymond's uncle and perceived that there was no danger of discovery for the attitude was that of a man completely absorbed. He was listening intently. At this distance the general hubbub was softened and there was a rather wistful quality in the childish voices rising and falling with the lilting old refrain:

After the lapse of a good many years it is this picture of Raymond's Uncle Horace that is the most vivid. There was some implication in the listening figure, with head slightly bowed, one hand resting on the casing of the doorway, that carried, even to a childish mind, a suggestion of hitherto unsuspected aspects of the rather lonely widower's personality. At the time it was all very vague and unformulated and later speculation has hesitated somewhat before the privacy thus unwittingly invaded. Yet afterward one could not help at least wondering what visions of his own childhood he saw as he listened to the silly old lines of the ancient folk game, handed down through so many generations and bearing their little testimony to the continuity of experience.

A tardy sense of eavesdropping awoke at last in the youthful visitor's mind—an understanding that he did not belong there. He slipped out as quietly as he had entered, but he took with him a dawning appreciation of a new incarnation of Raymond's Uncle Horace.

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