I made my selections slowly, studying the little man more than the flies. His head was as bald and pink as a baby’s. His lips were tremulous, and his eyes showed that pale blue opacity of the very old or very young. It was his hands that held me confounded. They were twisted like bird claws. How they could have ever taken wisps of feather and fine lengths of silk and wound them into the perfect semblance of tiny aërial creatures was more than I could conceive. He caught at my wondering and with a burst of crowing laughter he held the claws closer for inspection. “Handsome, hain’t they? Cal’ate I work ’em steady as most folks work a good pair. Can’t stand wet nor cold, no better ’n Gram Perkins could in hern. Good days she was the smartest knitter in the county.” So here was another Perkins. I aimed my habitual question at him, expecting no better results. “Tell me, do you know anything about those four dreams?” He sat a moment, motionless, in what one might have termed a vainglorious silence. He sucked his lips in and out over those vacant gums as if he found them full of flavour; then he suddenly burst into the triumphant crow of a chanticleer. “Yes m’am! Cal’ate I do know them dreams--seein’ I dreamed ’em. I be Zeb Perkins!” He said it with as sweet an unction as if he had announced himself King of the Hejaz. In a flash the room stood revealed anew. It spoke aloud of Sara Amanda Perkins, beloved wife of Benjamin Perkins, sea captain; of his clipper, of the relics of his voyages, of her handiwork in rugs and wreaths. The very begonias might be slip grandchildren of the ones she had planted. Here, indeed, was a stage set for those dreams. Here sat Zeb Perkins, playwright and stage manager, picking excitedly at his pink head, eternally ready to ring up his curtain. He caught my eye on the wreaths. “Them little tow-headed fergit-me-nots belonged to her first son as died a baby. She set a terrible store by him. The black in them susans come from her sister Ida, my great-aunt Perkins. See them coffin plates. Ye’ll see every one of them was copper, nickeled over, every one but Gram’s. Hers was solid.” There was a wealth of information conveyed in that last word. I had been standing until now. One of Zeb’s claws waved itself away from the coffin plates to a chair: “Set, woan’t ye? Ye’ll see them rockers under ye are worn as flat as sledge runners. That was Gram’s chair; and we wore them rockers off luggin’ her ’round. She was all crippled up, Gram was, same as me; only in them days there warn’t no wheel chairs.”