“Can’t we get Mary Gilbraith to tell us when it’s an hour?” Margaret Amelia suggested as they came in at the gate. “Then we won’t have to remember.” Mary Gilbraith stood beating a curtain, and we called to her. She nodded her head, wound in a brown veil. “Sure,” she said. “And don’t you children track up them clean floors inside there.” I glanced over my shoulder into the empty room. “Shall I get down,” I inquired of my guests, “or will you get up?” They would get up, and they did so. We three just fitted the sill, with Harold looking wistfully upward. “Go find a nice stick,” Margaret Amelia advised him maternally. “What’ll we play?” I was pursuing politely. “Pretend?” I intimated. Because of course there is nothing that is quite so much fun as pretend. “Or real?” I conceded the alternative its second place. “Pretend what?” Betty wanted to know. “Well, what difference does that make?” I inquired scornfully. “We can decide that after.” However, we duly weighed the respective merits of Lost-in-the-Woods, Cave-in-the Middle-of-the-World, and Invisible, a selection always involving ceremony. “Harold can’t play any of them,” Margaret Amelia remembered regretfully. “He don’t stay lost nor invisible--he wriggles. And Cave scares him.” We considered what to do with Harold, and at last mine was the inspiration--no doubt because I was on the home field. In a fence corner I had a play-house, roofed level with the fence top. From my sand-pile (sand boxes came later--mine was a corner of the garden sacred to me) we brought tin pails of earth which we emptied about the little boy, gradually covering his fat legs and nicely packing his plaid skirt. Then we got him a baking-powder can cover for a cutter and a handleless spoon, and we went away. He was infinitely content. “Makin’ a meat pie,” he confided, as we left him.