If anybody found us here--we were promptly driven off. The principal did this as a matter of course, but the janitor had the same power and much more emphasis. If one of the board was seen passing, we hid behind everything and, as we were never clear just who belonged to the board, we hid when nearly all grown-folk passed. That the building and grounds were ours, paid for by our father’s taxes, and that the school officials and even the tyrannical janitor were town servants to help us to make good use of our own, no more occurred to us than it occurred to us to find a ring in the ground, lift it, and descend steps. Nor as much, for we were always looking for a ring to lift. To be sure, we might easily fall into serious mischief in this stolen use of our property; but that it was the function of one of these grown-ups, whom we were forever dodging, to be there with us, paid by the town to play with us, was as wild an expectation as that fairies should arrive with golden hoops and balls and wings. Wilder, for we were always expecting the fairies and, secretly, the wings. That afternoon we did almost all these forbidden things--swings and seesaws and rings would have done exactly as well, only these had not been provided--and then we went to rest in the band-stand. Mary Elizabeth and I were feeling somewhat subdued--neither of us shone much in feats of skill, and here Delia and Margaret Amelia easily put us in our proper places. Calista was not daring, but she was a swift runner, and this entitled her to respect. Mary Elizabeth and I were usually the first ones caught, and the others were not above explaining to us frankly that this was why we preferred to play Pretend. “Let’s tell a story--you start it, Mary Elizabeth,” I proposed, anxious for us two to return to standing, for in collaborations of this kind Mary Elizabeth and I frankly shone--and the wish to shine, like the wish to cry out, is among the primitive phases of individual growth. “Let Margaret Amelia start it,” Delia tried to say, but already the story was started, Mary Elizabeth leaning far back, and beginning to braid and unbraid her long hair--not right away to the top of the braid, which was a serious matter and not to be lightly attempted with heavy hair, but just near the curling end. “Once,” she said, “a big gold sun was going along up in the sky, wondering what in the world--no, what in All-of-it to do with himself. For he was all made and done, nice and bright and shiny, and he wanted a place to be. So he knocked at all the worlds and said, ‘Don’t you want to hire a sun to do your urrants, take care of your garden, and behave like a fire and like a lamp?’ But all the worlds didn’t want him, because they all had engaged a sun first and they could only use one apiece, account of the climate. So one morning--he _knew_ it was morning because he was shining, and when it was night he never shone--one morning....”