“We have settled down in a stone bungalow right on the romantic waters of old Lake Minnetonka, with views. There is no city as large as Minneapolis that has as large not to say lovely a lake as Minnetonka within so small a comparable distance. Mrs. Saxinar and I often talk about the romantic Indians who used to canoe on these romantic waters.”

The bungalow was not actually of stone, but of cement blocks so pressed as to look somewhat like stones, and the Saxinars’ view did not actually include the justly celebrated expanse of Minnetonka, three blocks away from them, but only an eight-flat frame apartment house, a Seventh-Day Adventist chapel, and a grove of cottonwoods. But it was as snug a refuge for two happily querulous old parties as could have been contrived, and Neil felt content as he sat on a tufted yellow plush chair in the small living-room, whose yellow wallpaper was bedecked with a pattern of cat-tails and water lilies.

Though he had had a steak dinner at the Hotel Swanson-Grand, Gramma Julie insisted on taking him out to the kitchen and stuffing chocolate brownies into him. Hers was no glass-and-enamel magazine-advertisement kitchen. She cooked on an aged, not-too-well-polished coal-stove, and kept her treasures in a series of broken-nosed blue teapots and tin cracker-cans and her china came out of an antique shop and should have stayed there. Neil remembered that while his mother and Grampa Edgar had always insisted that they were neat (usually it was pins that they were as neat as), the gay little black beetle, Julie, was a genius of gipsy disorder.

But he noted that in this mess of crockery Gramma Julie could find anything she wanted, while his mother and Grampa, proud of arranging everything geometrically, of properly filing away addresses and letters and laundry bills and not-quite-wornout shoelaces, could never remember their own systems.

He returned with Julie to the living-room, to be grand-filial to that squat, bald, cheerful and complaining patriot, Grampa Edgar Saxinar.

He dutifully made the regulation queries about Edgar’s views on the state income tax, the last-season Minneapolis baseball team and future models of telephone instruments. (Edgar thought very little of any of them.) Then Neil demanded the one thing he really wanted to know:

“Gramma Julie, something Dad told me has got me interested in my ancestors. Tell me about your family, and Grampa’s.”

The little, odd, old lady, eighty-three now by the calendar and forty-three by the clock of her taut slim throat and the obsidian eyes that needed no spectacles, half gipsy and half Irish fay with a trace of Yankee stringency for preservative, knitting and rocking in the untidy old cane-seated chair that her husband detested, while he, with old-fashioned half-moon eyeglasses clerkly in his round red face, smoked a long stogie and constantly grunted in disbelief—Gramma Julie clucked like a nesting hen:

“Your Grampa Saxinar—that solid object there, smoking the stinkeroo—was born in Wisconsin and he worked for a sawmill, as bookkeeper, and he was a clerk and a telegrapher for the Chicago, Milwaukee before he got a job in the telephone office. And his folks, as far as he knows ‘em, were like everybody else: cheese-makers and mouse-trap salesmen—nice stupid people.”