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custom on fine days to loll in the hammock, reading, dozing, and watching casually for a bee-swarm; she took to nursing me there as well. Aunt Rosa and certain of the neighbors murmured; Uncle Konrad shook his head; but at feeding-times I was fetched to the hammock and suckled in the sight of any. At that time my mother had lost neither her pretty face and figure nor her wanton spirit: she twitted the schoolboys who gawked along the fence and the trashmen lingering at our cans; merrily she remarked upon reroutings and delays on the part of delivery wagons, which seldom before had used our alley. And she was as pleased as Grandfather, if for not the same reason, by the discomfiture of Mr. Erdmann, who now was constrained to keep what watch he would from an upstairs window.
    “Willy’s bashful as Konrad,” she said to Rosa. “Some men, I swear, you’d think they’d never seen anything.”
    Grandfather chuckled. “Willy’s just jealous. Hector he’s got used to, but he don’t like sharing you with the trashman.”
    But Mother could not be daunted by any raillery. “Listen to the pot call the kettle!”
    “
Ja
sure,” said Grandfather, and treated her to one of the pinches for which he was famed among East Dorset housewives.
    Mr. Erdmann’s response to the hammock was a bee-bob: he threaded dead bees into a cluster and mounted it on a pole, which he then erected near his skeps to attract the swarm.
    “He knows they won’t swarm for a naughty man,” Grandfather explained. “It wonders me he can even handle them.” In the old country, he declared, couples tested each other’s virtue by walking hand in hand among the hives, the chaste having nothing to fear.
    Mother was skeptical. “If bees were like that, not a man in Dorset could keep a hive. Except Konrad.”
    My uncle, as if she were not fondling the part in the middle of his hair, began to discourse upon the prophetic aspect of swarming among various peoples—
e.g.
, that a swarm on the house was thought by the Austrians to augur good fortune, by the Romans to warn of ill, and by the Greeks to herald strangers; that in Switzerland a swarm on a dry twig presaged the death of someone in the family, et cetera—but before ever he had got to the Bretons and Transylvanians his wife was his only auditor: Andrea was back in her magazine, and Grandfather had gone off to counter Erdmann’s bee-bob by rubbing the inside of his own hive with elder-flowers.
    The last Sunday of the month but one dawned bright, hot, still. Out on the river not even the bell-buoy stirred, whose clang we heard in every normal weather; in its stead the bell of Grace M.-P. Southern, mark of a straiter channel, called forth East Dorseters in their cords and worsteds. But ours was a family mired in apostasy. There was no atheism in the house; in truth there was no talk of religion at all, except in Hector’s most cynical moods. It was generally felt that children should be raised in the church, and so when the time camePeter and I would be enrolled in the Sunday-school and the Junior Christian Endeavor. More, Grandfather had lettered, gratis,
In Remembrance of Me
on the oak communion table and engraved the church cornerstone as well. We disapproved of none of the gentlemen who ministered the charge, although Grace, not the plum of the conference, was served as a rule by preachers very young or very old. Neither had we doctrinal differences with Methodism—Southern or Northern, Protestant or Episcopal: Aunt Rosa sometimes said, as if in explanation of our backsliding, “Why it is, we were all Lutherans in the old country”; but it would have been unkind to ask her the distinction between the faiths of Martin Luther and John Wesley. Yet though Konrad, with a yellow rosebud in his lapel, went faithfully to Bible class, none of us went to church. God served us on our terms and in our house (we were with a few exceptions baptized, wed, and funeraled in the good parlor); for better or worse it