Another year we converted my study behind the chimney into a pantry, opened it into the kitchen, made the "best room" into a dining-room, and left the long living-room with the big fireplace for library use only. That was a radical change and I had to build me a study over on a cedar slope--a good deal of a house, in fact, where I could gather my traps about me, for with the years my work had somehow invited a paraphernalia of shelves and files, and a variety of other furniture that required room. It was better for a growing-up family, too. With me out of the house, they had more freedom to grow up in, which, after all, was their human right, and the growing-up machinery could revolve as noisily as it pleased without furnishing a procrastinating author an added excuse for not working. No author with a growing-up family should work in his own home. He is impossible enough under even the best conditions. [Illustration] And how the family did grow up. Why, once when they were home from school I came from the study one day to find a young man in the house--a strange young man, from somewhere in the school neighborhood. I couldn't imagine what he was doing there until I was taken aside and it was explained to me that he was there to see our eldest, the Pride. That little girl, imagine! It is true she was eighteen--I counted, up on my fingers to see--but the Pride! why, only yesterday she was bare-footed, wading in the brook. Somehow I couldn't make it seem right. IV _And then one eventful day_ I suppose it was about that time that we acquired a car--it would be likely to be about that time. 'Most everybody was getting cars, and Lord Beaconsfield, good Old Beek, was getting slower each year and could no longer keep up even with our deliberate progress. Furthermore, I learned to drive the car, in time. It is true I knocked some splinters from the barn, put a crimp in a mud-guard, and smashed another man's tail-light in the process, but nothing fatal occurred, though I found it a pretty good plan to stick fairly close to my new study on the cedar slope if I wanted to keep up with the garage and damage bills. Those bills startled me, at first, and then, like everybody else, I became callous and reckless, and we did without a good many other things in order that the car might not go unshod or climb limpingly the stiff New England hills.