The New Boy was plainly taken aback. Here he was, as I see now, doing his best to be friendly and to make conversation personal, to say nothing of his having condescended to parley with a girl at all, and I was rewarding him with an abstraction. Said he: “Huh?” “If you was dirt--” I began a little doubtfully, but still sticking to the text. “I ain’t dirt,” denied the New Boy, with some heat. “I says, if you _was_ dirt--” I tried to tell him, in haste and some discomfort. He climbed down from the fence on which he had been socially contriving to stick, though his was the “plain” side. “There ain’t any girl,” he observed with dignity, “going to call me dirt, nor call me if-I-was-dirt, either,” and stalked back into the woodshed. I looked after him in the utmost distress. I had been dealing in what I had considered the amenities, and it had come to this. Already the New Boy hated me. I slipped to the ground and waited, watching through the cracks in the fence. Ages passed. At length I heard him call his dog and go whistling down the street. I climbed on the fence and sat looking over in the deserted garden. Round the corner of the house next door somebody came. I saw a long, gray plaid shawl, with torn and flapping tassels, pinned about a small figure, with long legs. As she put her hand on the latch, she flashed me her smile, and it was Mary Elizabeth. She went immediately inside the shed door, and left me staring. What was she doing there? What unexpected places I was always seeing her. Why should she go in the woodshed of the New Family whom we didn’t even know ourselves? After due thought, I dropped to the other side of the fence, and proceeded to the woodshed door myself. It was unlatched, and as I peered in, I caught the sweet, moist smell of green wood, like the cool breath of the wood yard, where I had first seen her. When my eyes became used to the dimness, I perceived Mary Elizabeth standing at the end of a pile of wood, of the sort which we used to denominate “chunks,” which are what folk now call fireplace logs, though they are not properly fireplace logs at all--only “chunks” for sitting-room stoves--and trying to look meet to new estates. They were evenly piled, and they presented a wonderful presence, much more human than a wall. “See,” said Mary Elizabeth, absorbedly, “every end of one is pictures. Here’s a wheel with a wing on, and here’s a griffin eating a lemon.” I stared over her shoulder, fascinated. There they were. And there were grapes and a chandelier and a crooked street.... Some moments later we were aware that the kitchen door had opened, and that somebody was standing there. It was the woman of the New Family, with a black veil wound round her head and the ends dangling. She shook a huge purple dust-cloth, and I do not seem to recall that there was anything else to her, save her face and veil and the cloth. “Now then!” she said briskly, and in a tone of dreadful warning. “_Now_ then!”