Going home--a delicate business, because stepping on any crack meant being poisoned forthwith--I tried to think it out: What was it that Mother and Grandma Bard knew that the rest didn’t know? I gave it up. All I could think of was that they seemed to know me. “Isn’t Grandma Bard just grand?” I observed fervently. “I’m afraid,” Mother said thoughtfully, “that sometimes she has rather a hard time to get on.” I was still turning this in my mind as we passed the wood yard. The wood yard was a series of vacant lots where some mysterious person piled cords and cords of wood, which smelled sweet and green and gave out cool breaths. Sometimes the gasoline wood-cutter worked in there, and we would watch till it had gone, and then steal in and bring away a baking-powder can full of sawdust. We never knew quite what to do with this sawdust. It was not desirable for mud-pies, and there was nothing that we knew of to be stuffed with it. Yet when we could, we always saved it. Perhaps it gave us an excuse to go into the wood yard, at which we always peeped as we went by. This day, I lagged a few steps behind and looked in, expectant of the same vague thing that we always expected, and never defined--a bonfire, a robber, an open cave, some changed aspect, I did not know what. And over by the sawdust pile, I saw, stepping about, a little girl in a reddish dress--a little girl whom I had never seen before. She looked up and saw me stand staring at her; and her gaze was so clear and direct that I felt obliged to say something in defence of my intrusion. “Hello,” I said. Her face suddenly brightened. “Hello,” she replied, and after a moment she added: “I thought you was going to say ‘how de do.’” A faint spark of understanding leapt between us. Dressed-up little girls usually did say “how de do.” It was only in a kind of unconscious deference to her own appearance that I had not done so. She was unkempt and ragged--her sleeve was torn from cuff to elbow. “What you doing here?” I inquired, not averse to breaking the business of calling by a bit of gossip. At this she did for the third time what I had been vaguely conscious of her having done: She glanced over her shoulder toward a corner of the yard which the piled wood concealed from me. I stepped forward and looked there. On an end of wood-pile which we children had pulled down so as to make a slope to ascend its heights, a man was sitting. His head and shoulders were drooping, his legs were relaxed, and his hands were hanging loose, as if they were heavy. His eyes were closed and his lips were parted, yet about the face, with its fair hair and beard, there was something singularly attractive and gentle. He looked like a man who would tell you a story. “Who’s he?” I asked, and involuntarily I whispered. The girl began backing a little away from me, her eyes on my face, her finger on her lips. “It’s my father,” she said. “He’s--resting.”