"Aw, Mr. Rucker, M-i-s-t-e-r Rucker, come home to get ready for supper," came in a loud, jovial voice that carried across the street like the tocsin of a bass drum. The Rucker home sat in a clump of sugar maples just opposite the Briars, and was square, solid and unadorned of vine or flower. A row of bright tin buckets hung along the picket fence that separated the yard from the store enclosure, and rain-barrels sat under the two front gutters with stolid practicability, in contrast to the usual relegation of such store-houses of the rainfall to the back of the house and the planting of ferns and water plants under the front sprouts, as was the custom from the beginning of time in Sweetbriar. Mrs. Rucker in a clean print dress and with glossy and uncompromisingly smoothed hair stood at the newly whitewashed front gate. "Send him on home, Rose Mary, or grass'll grow in his tracks and yours, too, if he can hold you long enough," she added by way of badinage. "I'm a-coming, Sally, right on the minute," answered the poet-by-stealth, and he hurried across the street with hungry alacrity. The poem-maker was tall and loose-jointed, and the breadth of his shoulders and long muscular limbs decidedly suggested success at the anvil or field furrow. He made a jocular pass at placing his arm around the uncompromising waist-line of his portly wife, and when warded off by an only half-impatient shove he contented himself by winding one of her white apron strings around one of his long fingers as they leaned together over the gate for further parley with the Alloways across the road. "When did you get back, Mrs. Rucker?" asked Rose Mary interestedly, as she rested her arms on the wall and Uncle Tucker planted himself beside her, having brushed away one of the long briar shoots to make room for them both.