The house next door had been vacant for two months when the New Family moved in. We had looked forward with excitement, not unmodified by unconscious aversion, to the arrival of the New Family.  
“Have they any girls?” we had inquired when the To Rent sign had come down.
 
They had, it appeared, one girl. We saw her, with wavy hair worn “let down” in the morning, though we ourselves wore let-down hair only for occasions, pig-tails denoting mornings. She had on new soles—we saw them showing clean as she was setting her feet daintily; and when we, who were walking the fence between the two houses, crossed glances with her, we all looked instantly away, and though it was with regret that we saw her put into the ’bus next day to go, we afterward learned, to spend the Spring with her grandmother in a dry climate,160 we still felt a certain satisfaction that our social habits were not to be disquieted.
 
Nothing at all had been suspected of a New Boy. Into that experience I came without warning.
 
I was sitting on the flat roof of my play-house in the fence corner, laboriously writing on the weathered boards with a bit of a picket, which, as everybody knows, will make very clear brown letters, when the woodshed door of the house next door opened, and the New Boy came out. He came straight up to the fence and looked up at me, the sun shining in his eyes beneath the rimless plush cap which he was still wearing. He was younger than I, so I was not too afraid of him.
 
“What you got?” he inquired.
 
I showed him my writing material.
 
“I wrote on a window with a diamond ring a’ready,” he submitted.
 
I had heard of this, but I had never wholly credited it and I said so. Besides, it would wear the ring out and who wanted to wear out a diamond ring to write on a window?
 
“It don’t wear it out,” the New Boy said. “It can keep right on writing forever and ever.”
 
161 “Nothing can keep right on forever,” I contended.
 
He cast about for an argument.
 
“Trees does,” he produced it.
 
I glanced up at them. They certainly seemed to bear him out. I decided to abandon the controversy, and I switched with some abruptness to a subject not unconnected with trees, and about which I had often wondered.
 
“If you was dirt,” I observed, “how could you decide to be into a potato when you could be into an apple just as well?”
 
The New Boy was plainly taken aback. Here he was, as I see now, doing his best to be friendly and to make conversation personal, to say nothing of his having condescended to parley with a girl at all, and I was rewarding him with an abstraction.
 
Said he: “Huh?”
 
“If you was dirt—” I began a little doubtfully, but still sticking to the text.
 
“I ain’t dirt,” denied the New Boy, with some heat.
 
“I says, if you was dirt—” I tried to tell him, in haste and some discomfort.
 
He climbed down from the fence on which he162 had been socially contriving to stick, though his was the “plain” side.
 
“There ain’t any girl,” he observed with dignity, “going to call me dirt, nor call me if-I-was-dirt, either,” and stalked back into the woodshed.
 
I looked after him in the utmost distress. I had been dealing in what I had considered the amenities, and it had come to this. Already the New Boy hated me.
 
I slipped to the ground and waited, watching through the cracks in the fence. Ages passed. At length I heard him call his dog and go whistling down the street. I climbed on the fence and sat looking over in the deserted garden.
 
Round the corner of the house next door somebody came. I saw a long, gray plaid shawl, with torn and flapping tassels, pinned about a small figure, with long legs. As she put her hand on the latch, she flashed me her smile, and it was Mary Elizabeth. She went immediately inside the shed door, and left me staring. What was she doing there? What unexpected places I was always seeing her. Why should she go in the woodshed of the New Family whom we didn’t even know ourselves?
 
163 After due thought, I dropped to the other side of the fence, and proceeded to the woodshed door myself. It was unlatched, and as I peered in, I caught the sweet, moist smell of green wood, like the cool breath of the wood yard, where I had first seen her. When my eyes became used to the dimness, I perceived Mary Elizabeth standing at the end of a pile of wood, of the sort which we used to denominate “chunks,” which are what folk now call fireplace logs, though they are not properly fireplace logs at all—only “chunks” for sitting-room stoves—and trying to look meet to new estates. They were evenly piled, and they presented a wonderful presence, much more human than a wall.
 
“See,” said Mary Elizabeth, absorbedly, “every end of one is pictures. Here’s a wheel with a wing on, and here’s a griffin eating a lemon.”
 
I stared over her shoulder, fascinated. There they were. And there were grapes and a chandelier and a crooked street....
 
Some moments later we were aware that the kitchen door had opened, and that somebody was standing there. It was the woman of the164 New Family, with a black veil wound round her head and the ends dangling. She shook a huge purple dust-cloth, and I do not seem to recall that there was anything else to her, save her face and veil and the cloth.
 
“Now then!” she said briskly, and in a tone of dreadful warning. “Now then!”
 
Mary Elizabeth turned in the utmost eagerness and contrition.
 
“Oh,” she said, “I come to see about the work.”
 
The New Family Woman towered at us from the top of the three steps.
 
“How much work,” she inquired with majesty, “do you think I’d get out of you, young miss, at this rate?”
 
Mary Elizabeth drew nearer to her and stood before her, down in the chips, in the absurd shawl.
 
“If you’ll leave me come,” she said earnestly, “I’ll promise not to see pictures. Well,” she added conscientiously, “I’ll promise not to stop to look at ’em.”
 
How much weight this would have carried, I do not know; but at that moment the woman chanced to touch with her foot a mouse-trap that stood on the top step, and it “sprung” and165 shed its cheese. In an instant Mary Elizabeth had deftly reset and restored it. This made an impression on the arbiter.
 
“You’re kind of a handy little thing, I see,” she said. “And of course you’re all lazy, for that matter. And I do need somebody. Well, I’ve got a woman coming for to-day. You can begin in the morning. Dishes, vegetables, and general cleaning, and anything else I think you can do. Board and clothes only, mind you—and them only as long as you suit.”
 
“Yes’m. No’m. Yes’m.” Mary Elizabeth tried to agree right and left.
 
Outside I skipped in the sun.
 
“We’re going to be next-yard neighbours,” I cried, and that reminded me of the New Boy. I told her about him as we went round by the gate, there being no cross piece for a foothold on that side the fence.
 
“Oh,” said Mary Elizabeth, “I know him. He’s drove me home by my braids. He doesn’t mean anything.”
 
“Well,” I said earnestly, “when you get a chance, you tell him that I wasn’t calling him dirt. I says if he was dirt, how could he tell to be a potato or an apple.”
 
166 Mary Elizabeth nodded. “Lots of boys pretend mad,” she said philosophic............