He wheeled himself to the door, opened it and rolled his chair out on the porch. A blue-denimed little figure rose up from the other end and showed a tousled head, bright dark eyes and a round dirty face with a calm expression. “I got my tunnel fixed,” he announced. “Did you?” asked Lester, with interest. “That can business did work?” To Mattie he explained, “Stephen is fixing up a railway system, and the sand kept falling in on his tunnel. We finally thought of taking the bottom out of an old baking-powder can. That leaves it open at both ends.” “It works dandy,” said Stephen. He now added of his own accord, with a casual look at Mrs. Farnham, “Hello, Aunt Mattie.” It was the first time Mrs. Farnham could remember that she had ever had a friendly greeting from Stephen. Eva’s conscientious attempts to make him perform the minimum of decent salutations, to come and shake hands and say “How do you do?” usually ended in a storm of raging stamping refusals. “Hello, Stephen,” she answered, feeling quite touched by his friendly tone. He looked very quiet and good-natured, too. Well, of course, all children do grow out of their naughty ways if you can only live till then. She had always said that Stephen would outgrow his. But she had never believed it. It was a good idea to have a sandpile for him. Children always like them. Of course it brought sand into the house something terrible. Children never would wipe their feet. But now that any attempt at real housekeeping had been given up in poor Eva’s house, a little more or less dirt didn’t matter. She had as a matter of fact (although she had denied it) noticed that the corners of the room were very dusty. And those preposterous papers on the floor! What a ridiculous idea! No more ridiculous than having the sandpile on the porch! Whoever heard of such a thing! “I should think you’d find it hard to keep the porch clean,” she said to Lester. “We don’t,” he said bafflingly. “Why not have it out in the yard?” “Some of the playthings would get spoiled by the rain.” He advanced this as conclusive. Stephen had squatted down again to his sand. She went cautiously towards the wide plank to see what he was doing, prepared to have him snarl out one of his hateful catch-words: “Go ’way! Go ’way!” or the one he had acquired lately, the insolent, “Who’s doing this anyhow?” But what she saw was so astonishing to her that before she could stop to think, she burst out in an impulsive exclamation of admiration, “Why, Stephen Knapp, did you do all that your_self_?” Beyond the board lay a tiny fairy-world of small, tree-lined, pebble-paved roads, moss-covered hills, small looking-glass lakes, white pasteboard farmhouses with green blinds, surrounded by neat white tooth-pick fences, broad meadows with red-and-white paper cows and a tiny farm wagon with minute, plumped-out sacks, driving to the railroad.