“You don’t need to tell me how you make your schnapps, John,” gasped Uncle Louie, and both men cackled loudly. Uncle John opened the cupboard again. He took out a stone jar of oatmeal cookies which he passed to the children. Then he lifted them up to see other treasures inside the magic cupboard, little wooden windmills, boats with little sailors in them, little wooden dwarfs with nails made into anvils, all manner of toys he had carved or forged himself. Marcia hoped he would give them some but he dusted them off with a red handkerchief and tenderly put them back. Before they left he hammered crossed nails to make scissors for each of them, so it was a profitable visit after all. Lena and her friend Mary Evelyn Stewart often put crossed pins on the streetcar tracks behind the London Junction school for the car wheels to crush into scissors, but the big nails in the forge made them much better. They were so pleased that they tried not to hurt Uncle John’s feelings by screaming when he swung them, first one and then the other, high in the air. They carried the bruises of his iron fingers on their ribs for days afterward.

Back in the buggy they rolled swiftly down the cobblestone street on to the dusty road. Uncle Louie gave his attention to the horse which was almost running away in his eagerness to get home. Once in a while Uncle Louie would burst into a loud yodel of joy, a few bars of some song that had no words but “Hi dee hi dee hi oh de hi de hi do ho oh.” Then he would wink at them and say, “How about a song, Old Socks, hey, Pussy?”

So they would sing all the songs they had learned from Papa and from Sunday school and from Lena’s school. They sang, “Can you bake a cherry pie, charming Billy?” and “A frog he would a-wooing go,” and “Three blind mice,” while Uncle Louie chorused with a “hi dee hi dee hi dee ho” and the horse whinnied. Approaching Willardville, where Grandpa Willard’s folks all settled, they began smelling something queer, which Uncle Louie explained was the Rubber Works. There was a big factory here with one big store and a row of little yellow frame houses all alike, two saloons and a public square with a bandstand pavilion in it. There was a new brick hotel by the depot with a stuffed bear in the yard, standing on its hind legs. A red automobile at the curb was a rare sight, indeed, but as all the other sights were rare to the girls they accepted it as no stranger than the stuffed bear or the smell of rubber. In spite of these wonders, the town seemed to begin and end all in one spot, huddling all its pretensions to importance in the square, the streets branching off from it being no more than country lanes.