"I am sure he didn't want me to find out that he had made the seat. But for a hired man he met the situation with ease. He simply asked me to stand there while he drove one more nail; then, he said, his work would be complete. When he'd finished he held out his hand and invited me to climb into the nest. All this with the rain spattering on us! Of course I had to tell him that it was perfectly lovely and had been such a jolly surprise and that I had thought Webb had made it. And now comes the funny part. He explained in a sort of sheepish way that he thought _I was a little girl_! Jonathan had told him that Miss Sabrina's little niece was coming to Happy House. When he caught a glimpse of me in the stage (he dared to say this) he thought I looked like a 'jolly sort of a kid.' Then that very afternoon he saw me turn a handspring in the orchard--and climb the tree! He said he got to thinking what a sort of dull place Happy House would be for any youngster, and that it would be fun for him to do some little thing to make it jollier for her. He admitted, to use his own words, that he was flabbergasted to find that I wasn't a kid after all! I'm glad, in a 'close-up' I _do_ look my years! "But can't you see that that explains _everything_ and that he _wasn't_ impertinent, after all? "Of course, living in cities all my life, I've always had an impression that hired men were just big, clumsy, dirty looking creatures who ate with knives and always smelled horsey. This Peter Hyde isn't that way at all. He's tanned copper-color but his face and hands look clean and except for his clothes, he doesn't look much different from any one else. And now that he knows I am quite grown-up (at least in years) he treats me very nicely. "We're going to do all sorts of nice things for Davy Hopworth, who is a very nice, bright youngster, but, just because he's a Hopworth, the other boys get punished for playing with him and that makes both Peter Hyde and me indignant. "Isn't the world funny, Claire, how the sins of the fathers and the grandfathers are visited upon the children--at least in places like this? Of course my beloved Finnegans are too busy just keeping the present generation going, to think much about the past, and the world they live in rushes too fast to stop to think that Timmy Finnegan, maybe's, going to rob a bank because his great-great-grandfather, over in County Cork, ran off with a pig.