Six years later and it is summer again in Ridgefield. Uncle Zach has celebrated his ninetieth birthday, and except for his lameness is nearly as hale and hearty as he was when he first welcomed the Masons and the Tracys to his home. Jeff’s presence has worked wonders in him and in the house as well. In a quiet way he assumed the role of master while nominally acting under Mr. Taylor’s orders. The servants, who had become lax and worthless, have been dismissed, and others more competent hired in their place. The house has been thoroughly renovated and refurnished. Many of the former boarders, who had gone to the Tremont, have come back, and a few people from Boston spend the summers there. “If Dot was only here, and I had my laigs it would seem like old times,” Uncle Zach often says to Jeff, who is his right hand and left hand and feet and brains. If kindness to an old man can atone for the past Jeff is atoning for it. He puts his master to bed at night as if he were a child and dresses him in the morning. Every pleasant day he takes him for what he calls a drive through the town, stopping wherever the querulous old man wishes to stop and wheeling him so carefully that his rheumatic limbs seldom receive a jolt. Nero is always in attendance and is as much a part of the turnout as Jeff himself. Uncle Zach no longer _shoos_ him when he puts his head on his knees, but he sometimes has pricks of conscience as to what Dotty would say if she could see the big dog stretched on the floor of the piazza or wherever he chose to lie. Dotty’s habits are deferred to by both Uncle Zach and Jeff, except the quarterly house cleanings. At these Jeff has drawn the line. Twice a year was sufficient, he said, for any house, and Uncle Zach agreed with him. Every three months, however, a dress coat and vest and little yellow blanket are brought out to air, the blanket so tender with age that Jeff scarcely dares touch it. “Johnny’s blanket,” Uncle Zach always says, with a tone very different from that in which he speaks of his swallow tail. “Fool and his money soon parted,” he said when telling Jeff what it had cost. “I never wore it but once and never shall again. The missionaries don’t want it, nor the heathen. If you had any use for it I’d give it to you. It seems a pity for it to lay there year in and year out smellin’ like fury with that moth stuff you put in it.” Jeff laughed and thanked him as he folded up the garments and laid them away with Taylor’s Tavern in the hair trunk. Once he brought the sign down for Uncle Zach to see.