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make Patsy do tricks on the raffia runner. After Mrs. Hooper gave her a little nod, Ma said to Lew, "How would you like to take Patsy home with you?"
    Mrs. Hooper was giving up her house to live in a New York apartment where pets were not allowed, and she was looking for a good home for the dog. Lew, being the eldest, established immediate sovereignty over Patsy, while I, tears brimming, sneaked down the steps and off behind the hotel. Wouldn't that damn Lew get a dog to keep? I refused to eat dinner, and Ma, saying I'd gotten too much sun, put me to bed (up in one of the attic rooms where the children always slept).
    The woman called Mrs. Harleigh gave me a long, sorrowful look of commiseration as I was led up to bed, eloquent with sympathy in the matter of the dog; she knew just how I felt, I could tell. Later, when the hotel was asleep, I awoke hungry. Somewhere I could hear low voices from another room on the same floor. I fought my hunger pangs as long as I could, and when the voices fell silent I crept downstairs to the kitchen. In the large refrigerator I found a bowl of tapioca, some of which I spooned into a green-banded white dish and carried it with me out behind the bathhouses where the dog was kept. Putting the half-eaten tapioca aside, I spent perhaps half an hour petting and talking to Patsy, the fox terrier, and hating Lew because it was to be "his" dog. I was coming through the latticed breezeway, finishing the tapioca, when I saw a figure in white walking along the moonlit gravel path in the rose garden. It was Mrs. Harleigh. I wanted to bring her to see the dog, but was frustrated in this action by another figure, who approached her from the veranda: Mr. Stevenson, the hotel owner, and as he came up to her, I crouched in the shadows and tried to listen. He spoke rapidly, in a low tone I couldn't understand, but I heard Mrs. Harleigh's laugh well enough.
    "Of course, Mr. Stevenson, if that is your wish. In any case, I don't suppose the salt air is helping my complexion. We'll leave in the morning, if that will be convenient." With another low laugh, she went along the path to the veranda, and disappeared inside. I returned my empty tapioca dish to the kitchen and crept back to bed. Next day, Mrs. Harleigh and her servants left in the great car, while Mrs. Hooper stayed on. There was a flurry of conjecture among the other guests at the hasty departure, and when queried, Mrs. Hooper seemed as mystified as anyone else.
    Returning to Pequot Landing, I stationed myself at various vantage points to glimpse our newly discovered neighbor, but there was no Mrs. Harleigh to be seen. While Lew and Harry were away with their gang, setting off firecrackers hoarded from last Fourth of July, or popping their BB guns down in Hubbard's woods, or wherever they went that I wasn't allowed to go, I kept a vigilant watch on whatever occurred -- little enough, to my lights -- over the way. Mrs. Sparrow may have seen more through her Seiss-Altags than I with my Peeping Tom's eye, but to both of us things were nothing if not downright ordinary.
    I did not know it then, but this was one of Lady's "retirements," always distressing periods for her. Once I accidentally threw a rock through her window, and she came to the door and reprimanded me sharply. I didn't play around there for a while, but later, in speaking of her to Ma, I said, "Gee, Mrs. Harleigh sure is nice -- except when you break her windows." The remark was repeated to her, and she came running out her door and across the Green to catch me on the way home from school and hug me, saying she was sorry she had scolded me. I think she liked me more after that.
    But it was to be many years before I discovered why she had laughed when she swept out of the moonlit rose garden.
4
    "Trees are God's most perfect race."
    I recall Lady saying that to me once in one of her more dour moments when she was inclined to view God's race of men cynically. The trees are mostly gone now, but