Uncle Louie was a thin wiry man with sandy hair, more of this in his great moustache, eyebrows, and sprouting from his nose and ears than actually on his head. He was so tall that the effort of talking to a much shorter wife and other people had made him humped so that his sharp chin seemed to rest far down on his flat chest and the back of his neck bent over almost horizontally. His face was weather-beaten and red, with his eyes as round and blue as the sky, only red-rimmed and edged with fair downy lashes that looked like chicken feathers. There was a good deal of the rooster in Uncle Louie which was only natural in a farmer and very fascinating to observe. When anybody talked he cocked his head gravely and kept his eyes fixed on them with a rooster’s suspicious curiosity. Then he winked solemnly, and scratched his stomach as if he was scratching for corn. He talked little but listened to everybody intently, suddenly bursting into a rafter-shaking laugh that was half-cackle and half-whinny, and made everybody else laugh, too. He carried money in the sole of his boot and took it off to pay Papa for a brass bed he ordered from the London Furniture Store. As they rolled down the road toward Elmville he took off his thick boot again to pay for a corn shucker in the New Amsterdam Hardware Store. When he wanted small change for drinks of Moxie or hard candy at corner stores, he had to unbutton his shirt where a cotton tobacco pouch was pinned containing his small change or “chicken feed.” From the beginning Marcia was his favorite because she spoke up to him.

“You’re my girl, Old Socks,” he said, with a wink. “Pussy here can be Betts’s girl.”

“Will we have anybody to play with?” Lena asked. “I don’t want to have to play just with Marcia all the time.”

Uncle Louie cackled again, and tweaked her curls.

“Why, Pussy, you got more to play with than there is in Buckingham Palace. There’s Billy, he’s a goat, and Old Tom, he’s a bull, and one hundred sheep and six cows and Tiddley Winks, the biggest Eskimo dog you ever saw, and a few hundred chicks, not counting the ducks and turkeys and geese and the rabbits and woodchucks and chipmunks and Almedy and the twelve Chapman kids two miles down the pike.”

Lena frowned, for she hated being teased.

“How old’s Almedy?” asked Lena.

Uncle Louie considered this.

“Almedy’s pushing sixteen,” he decided finally. “When you get them from the orphanage you can’t tell, so we just let Almedy pick her own birthday.”

“I’d like to pick my birthday,” Lena sighed. “What did Almedy pick?”

“Almedy picked Fourth of July last year but this year she picked Decoration Day.” Uncle Louie said, “Being an orphan she can pick a different birthday every year.”

“Are you sure you haven’t any children of your own for us to play with, Uncle Louie?” Lena persisted, still frowning, for Almedy sounded far too grown up.