The fork-tailed birds, azure-blue in the sunlight, swooped and curved in and out of the tottering cupola that crowned the decaying mansion. They used the air as fishes use a river; they seemed to swing and spin effortlessly on invisible currents. "If I had to be a bird, I'd be a swallow," Foster said. "They have the best time flying. They look as if they do." "If you were a bird, you'd have to eat bugs," Davey told him. "You'd have to eat worms. You'd _like_ to eat worms. Oig. If anybody told me I had to be a bird, I wouldn't." At the Tuckertown house they set their burdens down on the front doorstep. They had decided before getting down to work to pay a call first to Mr. Payton, because his house was nearest, and then to Mrs. Cheever. "Because it's the polite thing to do," Julian said, his courteous Gone-Away manners descending on him like a mantle. "And anyway because we want to," Foster added. "Check." Feeling as light as the swallows, now that their hands were free, the children ran along the footpath that lay between the Gone-Away houses and the swamp, connecting Mr. Payton's house at the extreme right to Mrs. Cheever's house at the extreme left. As they neared Mr. Payton's house, a faint smell of goat was wafted toward them, mingling with all the other smells: roses, fresh grass, swamp water. "Wind's from the north," Julian commented, not without logic, since Mr. Payton's house was at the north end of Gone-Away and he kept goats. They found him busy in his vegetable garden at the far side of his house. The rows of vegetables, perfectly straight, were stripes of various greens except for two, which were strangely covered up with cloth. "Good morning, good morning!" Mr. Payton called, delighted to see them. He took off his broad-brimmed hat, waving it in a flourish of welcome. "Ma-a-a," called Uncle Sam, the billy goat, from his pen near the woods. Perhaps he meant it as a greeting. "May I offer anyone a radish? Or a spring onion? Or a very young carrot? These are all my garden affords at present," Mr. Payton said, but for once nobody was hungry, not even Julian. "We had waffles," Foster explained. "Ah. Entirely understandable." Near Mr. Payton's garden there was another just like it but without a fence around it. This was his rabbit or guest garden for animals. There was food there for any hungry rabbit, woodchuck, field mouse, or deer.