"I should think so." She threw back her head and drew in the sweet, sun-laden air. "It's the very best time of all the year." He didn't answer. "Don't you think so?" "I think it a little melancholy, for all it's so beautiful." "How curious! It's the time that makes me happiest." "Is it?" "Perhaps you prefer spring?" She spoke as one condescending to childishness. "A good many people seem to." "Yes, all the old, and all--" "All what?" "All foreigners." The breakfast-bell rang. No trays went up-stairs that morning. Everybody appeared, and the two girls couldn't remember when so gay a party had assembled in the dingy dining-room. But the pleasantry was of that strictly family character whose special savor is withheld from the outsider. As Ethan was taking his place by Mrs. Gano, he stopped suddenly, catching sight of the preternaturally tall silver coffee-pot, and made obeisance. "Sir or madam," he said, "I've travelled far since we parted, but I've never seen your equal." Mrs. Gano laughed with the rest. "That means the Mioto air has made you readier for your morning cup than you've been since you were here before. Or perhaps you agree with Frederika Bremer's old woman, 'When I see a coffee-pot, it's the same to me as if I saw an angel from heaven.'" "She must have meant this one." "Emmie has another name for it," said John Gano, also unbending. "Father!" remonstrated his little daughter, blushing, "it's a great many years since I called it anything but coffee-pot." "But before that?" persisted cousin Ethan. "Possi-tot!" And everybody but Emmie laughed as if it were the finest jest in the world. After breakfast they all walked about the grounds in a body, John Gano pointing out the superiority of his trees, and Ethan indicating his best-beloved old haunts, the two girls exchanging looks of amazement that he should know their playground so intimately. Ethan was much struck by the general dilapidation. If Uncle Elijah--peace to his ashes!--had found cause to remark nearly twenty years before that the place was going to ruin, there was good ground for the assertion to-day. Ethan remembered the wilderness as being inexorably confined to that vast region (pitifully shrunken to the older eye) below the second flight of stone steps. But "Mr." Hall, who had mowed and clipped and gardened the upper region, having joined the ghosts, for whom he had felt so little fellowship here on earth, the wilderness had risen in his absence and howled, mounting terrace after terrace, and was now laying open siege to the very Fort itself. To be sure, there were garden borders under the front windows, where John Gano lingered with a tender solicitude, lamenting for the Eschscholtzia's sake the lack of sun. But the flourishing and carefully tended pansy border marked only the more definitely the surrounding desolation. "There's a strange dog!" said Mrs. Gano. "Some one has left the gate open."