First of all there was Every Day, with breakfast, lunch, outdoors, dinner, and evenings.  
Then there were Sundays, which were quite another kind of time, as different as layer cake from sponge cake: With breakfast late, and mustn’t-jump-rope, and the living-room somehow different, the Out-of-doors moved farther off, our play-house not waiting for us but acting busy at something else in which we had no part; the swing hanging useless as it did when we were away from home and thought about it in the night; bells ringing as if it were their day; until we were almost homesick to hear the grocer’s cart rattle behind the white horse.
 
There were school half holidays when the sun shone as it never shone before, and we could not decide how to spend the time, and to look ahead seemed a glorious year before dark.
 
There were the real holidays—Christmas148 and the Fourth and Birthdays, which didn’t seem like days of time at all, but were like fairies of time, not living in any clock.
 
And Company-time, when we were not to go in certain rooms, or sing in the hall, and when all downstairs seemed unable to romp with us.
 
And Vacation-time, when 9 o’clock and 1 o’clock and 4 o’clock meant nothing, and the face of the clock never warned or threatened and the hands never dragged, and Saturday no longer stood out but sank into insignificance, and the days ran like sands.
 
All these times there were when life grew different and either let us in farther than ever before or else left us out altogether. But almost the strangest and best of these was house-cleaning time.
 
Screens out, so that the windows looked like faces and not like masks! The couch under the Cooking-apple tree! We used to lie on the couch and look up in the boughs and wish that they would leave it there forever. What was the rule that made them take it in? Mattresses in the backyard to jump on and lie on and stare up from, so differently, into the blue. Rugs like rooms, opening out into an adjoining pansy149 bed. Chairs set about on the grass, as if at last people had come to understand, as we had always understood, that the Outdoors is a real place to be in, and not just a place to pass through to get somewhere else. If only, if only some day they had brought the piano out on the lawn! To have done one’s practising out there, just as if a piano were born, not made! But they never did that, and we were thankful enough for the things that they did do. When Saturday came, I found with relief that they had still the parlour and one bedroom left to do. I had been afraid that by then these would be restored to the usual dry and dustless order.
 
In the open window of the empty sitting-room I was sitting negligently that morning, when I saw Mr. Britt going by. He was as old as anyone I knew in the world—Mr. Britt must have been fifty. I never thought of him as folks at all. There were the other neighbours, all dark-haired and quick and busy at the usual human errands; and then there was Mr. Britt, leaving his fruit trees and his rose bushes to go down to his office in the Court House. He had white hair, a long square white beard, and he carried a stick with a crook in the handle. I150 watched him pityingly. His life was all done, as tidy as a sewed seam, as sure as a learned lesson. All lived out, a piece at a time, just as I planned mine. How immeasurably long it had taken him; what a slow business it must have seemed to him; how very old he was!
 
At our gate he stopped. Mr. Britt’s face was pink, and there were pleasant wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and when he talked, he seemed to think about you.
 
“Moving?” he inquired.
 
“House-cleaning,” I explained with importance.
 
“Fine day of it,” he commented and went on. He always sighed a little when he spoke, not in sorrow; but in a certain weariness.
 
In forty-two years I should be as old as that. Forty-two years—more than five life-times, as I knew them.
 
I was still looking after him, trying to think it through—a number as vast as the sky of stars was vast—when round the corner, across the street, the Rodman girls appeared. (“Margaret and Betty Rodman?” my mother used to inquire pointedly when I said “the Rodman girls.”) In their wake was their little brother, Harold. I hailed them joyously.
 
151 “Come on over! It’s house-cleaning.”
 
“We were,” admitted Betty, as they ran. “We saw the things out in the yard, and we asked right off. We can stay a whole hour.”
 
“Can’t we get Mary Gilbraith to tell us when it’s an hour?” Margaret Amelia suggested as they came in at the gate. “Then we won’t have to remember.”
 
Mary Gilbraith stood beating a curtain, and we called to her. She nodded her head, wound in a brown veil.
 
“Sure,” she said. “And don’t you children track up them clean floors inside there.”
 
I glanced over my shoulder into the empty room.
 
“Shall I get down,” I inquired of my guests, “or will you get up?”
 
They would get up, and they did so. We three just fitted the sill, with Harold looking wistfully upward.
 
“Go find a nice stick,” Margaret Amelia advised him maternally.
 
“What’ll we play?” I was pursuing politely. “Pretend?” I intimated. Because of course there is nothing that is quite so much fun as152 pretend. “Or real?” I conceded the alternative its second place.
 
“Pretend what?” Betty wanted to know.
 
“Well, what difference does that make?” I inquired scornfully. “We can decide that after.”
 
However, we duly weighed the respective merits of Lost-in-the-Woods, Cave-in-the Middle-of-the-World, and Invisible, a selection always involving ceremony.
 
“Harold can’t play any of them,” Margaret Amelia remembered regretfully. “He don’t stay lost nor invisible—he wriggles. And Cave scares him.”
 
We considered what to do with Harold, and at last mine was the inspiration—no doubt because I was on the home field. In a fence corner I had a play-house, roofed level with the fence top. From my sand-pile (sand boxes came later—mine was a corner of the garden sacred to me) we brought tin pails of earth which we emptied about the little boy, gradually covering his fat legs and nicely packing his plaid skirt. Then we got him a baking-powder can cover for a cutter and a handleless spoon, and we went away. He was infinitely content.
 
153 “Makin’ a meat pie,” he confided, as we left him.
 
Free, we were dr............