neighborhood called Lickitysplit. I lived with my Aunt Deel and my
Uncle Peabody Baynes on a farm. They were brother and sister--he about
thirty-eight and she a little beyond the far-distant goal of forty.

My father and mother died in a scourge of diphtheria that swept the
neighborhood when I was a boy of five. For a time my Aunt Deel seemed to
blame me for my loss.

"No wonder they're dead," she used to say, when out of patience with me
and--well I suppose that I must have had an unusual talent for all the
noisy arts of childhood when I broke the silence of that little home.

The word "dead" set the first mile-stone in the long stretch of my
memory. That was because I tried so hard to comprehend it and further
because it kept repeating its challenge to my imagination. I often
wondered just what had become of my father and mother and I remember
that the day after I went to my aunt's home a great idea came to me. It
came out of the old dinner-horn hanging in the shed. I knew the power of
its summons and I slyly captured the horn and marched around the house
blowing it and hoping that it would bring my father up from the fields.
I blew and blew and listened for that familiar halloo of his. When I
paused for a drink of water at the well my aunt came and seized the horn
and said it was no wonder they were dead. She knew nothing of the
sublime bit of necromancy she had interrupted--poor soul!

I knew that she had spoken of my parents for I supposed that they were
the only people in the world who were dead, but I did not know what it
meant to be dead. I often called to them, as I had been wont to do,
especially in the night, and shed many tears because they came no more
to answer me. Aunt Deel did not often refer directly to my talents, but