At the time when the Snockerty obsession overtook us, Ellen McGee was the only real rival I had for the leadership of the pasture; if she had not had, along with all her Irish quickness, a touch of Irish sycophancy, I should have lost all my ascendency after the advent of Snockerty. I feel sure now that Ellen must have invented him; she was most enviably furnished in all the signs of lucky and unlucky and what it meant if you put your stocking on wrong side out in the morning, with charms to say for warts, and scraps of Old World song that had all the force of incantations. Her fairy tales too had a more convincing sound, for she got them from her father, who had always known somebody who knew the human participators. It was commonly insisted by Mrs. Allingham that the McGee children would never come to anything, and I believe, in fact, they never did, but they supplied an element of healthful vulgarity in our lives that, remembering Alfred Allingham's adolescent priggishness, I am inclined to think was very good for us. If I have said nothing of my parents until now, it is because the part they played in our lives for the first ten years was, from our point of view, negligible. Parents were a sort of natural appendage of children, against whose solidarity our performance had room and opportunity. They kept the house together; they staved off fear--no one, for instance, would think of sleeping in a place where there were no parents--they bulked large between us and the unknown. There was a general notion of our elders toward rubbing it into us that we ought to be excessively grateful to them for not having turned us adrift, _sans_ food and housing, but I do not think we took it seriously.