I have written to Uncle Carlton again, asking him about my Chilean Nitrate shares. If the company’s reorganized and the mines opened again, surely my stock ought to be worth something.

The days are getting shorter, and the hot weather is over for good, I hope. I usually like autumn on the prairie, but the thought of fall, this year, doesn’t fill me with any inordinate joy. I’m unsettled and atonic, and it’s just as well, I fancy, that I’m weaning the Twins.

It’s not the simple operation I’d expected, but the worst is already over. Pee-Wee is betraying unmistakable serpentine powers, and it’s no longer safe to leave him on a bed. Poppsy is a fastidious little lady, and apparently a bit of a philosopher. She is her father’s favorite. Whinstane Sandy is loyal to little Dinkie, and, now that the evenings are longer, regales him on stories, stories which the little tot can only half understand. But they must always be about animals, and Whinnie seems to run to wolves. He’s told the story of the skater and the wolves, with personal embellishments, and Little Red Riding-Hood in a version all his own, and last night, I noticed, he recounted the tale of the woman in the sleigh with her children when the pack of wolves pursued her. And first, to save herself and her family, she threw her little baby out to the brutes. And when they had gained on her once more, she threw out her little girl, and then her little boy, and then her biggest boy of ten. And when she reached a settlement and told of her deliverance, the Oldest Settler took a wood-ax and clove her head clear down to the shoulder-blades—the same, of course, being a punishment for saving herself at the expense of her little ones.

My Dinkie sat wriggling his toes with delight, the tale being of that gruesome nature which appeals to him. It must have been tried on countless other children, for, despite Whinnie’s autobiographical interjections, the yarn is an old and venerable one, a primitive Russian folk-tale which even Browning worked over in his Ivan Ivanovitch.

Dinky-Dunk, wandering in on the tail end of it, remarked: “That’s a fine story, that is, with all those coyotes singing out there!”

“The chief objection to it,” I added, “is that the lady didn’t drop her husband over first.”

Dinky-Dunk looked down at me as he filled his pipe.

“But the husband, as I remember the story, had been left behind to do what a mere husband could to save their home,” my spouse quietly reminded me.