But Val and Emmie preferred the other form. A baby of your own to play with when you are only fifteen! Ha, _that_ was the way to begin life! People in these times shilly-shallied so wastefully. This great-grandmother hadn't missed anything by her promptitude in marrying. After she was a wife and a mother, she used to call her girl friends into the high-walled garden, and stationing a slave on the gate-post, to keep watch and give warning when the husband could be seen coming home from his counting-house, this real, proper kind of a great-grandmother would tuck up her long skirts and have a rousing game of hide-and-seek, stopping breathless in the middle when Sambo cried from his watch-tower, "Massa comin'!" She would let down her gown and pin up her curls and go demurely to the gate to meet her lord, and tell him the baby and she had had a good day. Ah, it was plain they had been a frivolous pair! Theirs were the mahogany tables with slender, twisted legs and baize-lined folding tops, that in these serious days never caught sight of a card. Instead of reading Blair's "Sermons" and Baxter's "Rest," this agreeable ancestor had accumulated all those French romances down-stairs, and even when he left gay youth behind, he had sat in his counting-house, not like the King of Hearts, counting out his money, but revelling in the novels of the Wizard of the North. And when it was noised about at home among his growing daughters that he had nearly finished the latest one, and would bring it back that evening, the three girls would start fair and even from the bottom step, at his coming-home hour, and race to meet him. The lucky one who reached him first got the new _Waverley_. To the adaptable eye of youth "all things are possible," with parents as with God. It never occurred to Val and Emmie as a subject for surprise or inquiry how such a person as their grandmother had come to find herself _dans cette galère_. Mrs. Gano would usually wind up her Calvert stories with a half-humorous, half-reverent smile. "Your great-grandmother"--she never said "my father" or "mother," but with a detached, impartial air--"your great-grandmother was the best woman I ever knew; and your great-grandfather lived a useful life, and died, after receiving extreme unction, in all the odor of sanctity." "He wasn't a Pisspocalian, like us?" Emmie asked. "No; Roman Catholic. We had all gone different ways by that time, but he would say, 'Ah! wait till you're as old as I: you'll all come back into the bosom of Mother Church.'" She would smile at this. "He was not a thinker--he had lived all his best years in the active world of work and pleasure, and when he saw his end in sight, he looked about him for a priest." She would smile again--less tenderly, more ironically. "This was priests' business; best leave it in their hands." It was interesting to the children to observe that not even for the benefit of the young was family history falsified.