Again they tore through the glare and the heat. Jim’s black head was nodding now against Miss Johnson’s very angular elbow, and Grif, too, began to grow drowsy. He wondered what it would be like at grandpapa’s. Only Edward――who was to come on later from school――and Barbara had been there before. Edward and Barbara had given innumerable accounts of their previous visit, entering into all details, but things for Grif often had a mysterious way of turning out to be quite different from other people’s descriptions of them. _His_ things were rarely _their_ things; and it came into his sleepy head that everybody’s things must be unlike everybody else’s. _His_ trees, for instance, were not Jim’s or Barbara’s, or Ann’s or Edward’s. They were just _his_――or _were_ they his? Was he not rather theirs? Why, if he was not, did they stoop down with long green arms to catch him? and why was there such a roaring in their branches as he had never heard before? He tried to escape, to run away, but they closed him in on every side; they clutched him, and he tore at their green, shadowy embrace, scattering the leaves in showers.... “By Jove, I’ve been asleep!” he thought, as the crash of another train whizzing by awoke him with a start. He smiled at Miss Johnson, whose glittering pince-nez was fixed upon him with an expression at once severe and anxious. His smile was intended to be reassuring, but he knew from past experience that Miss Johnson would not be reassured. If she took nothing to do with his education, she had, since his father and mother were started on their travels in the East, taken a great deal to do with him in other ways. It was rather a bore, of course, but then it would soon be over, for in the autumn he was going to school――to the same school as Edward. Miss Johnson had remarked that it would remove a load from her mind when he actually went, and he knew he should have gone a year ago had his people only been able to convince themselves that he was strong enough. This, in fact――this question of his strength――was just the mental load Miss Johnson had alluded to. For that matter, he couldn’t remember a time when it _wasn’t_ there for some one――a thing to be discussed and described――discussed even with Grif himself. If they would only let him alone, he thought, he would be all right. But they never would. Miss Johnson, indeed, made more fuss than anybody else ever had. She did nothing but fuss. She was fussing now because he had fallen asleep, just as she had fussed at other times because he had remained awake. You would think from what she said that he could _help_ being liable to catch colds which passed almost immediately into high fevers; could help a nocturnal restlessness which led him fine dances in dreamland, and sometimes, though not lately, had even led him from the safety of bed. Then, out of blind wanderings, he had awakened, bewildered and cold, recognizing nothing about him in the