day, moreover, Mr. and Mrs. Cole were immensely busied with
preparations for some parochial tea. Miss Trefusis had calls to
make, and, of course, Uncle Samuel was invisible. The Birthday then
suddenly became no longer a birthday but an ordinary day--with an
extraordinary standard. This is why so many birthdays end in tears.

But Jeremy, as was usual with him, took everything quietly. He might
cry aloud about such an affair as the conquest of the wicker chair
because that did not deeply matter to him, but about the real things
he was silent. The village was one of the real things; during all
the morning he remained shut up in his soul with it, the wide world
closed off from them by many muffled doors. How had Uncle Samuel
known that he had deep in his own inside, so deep that he had not
mentioned it even to himself, wanted something just like this?
Thirty years ago there were none of the presents that there are for
children now--no wonderful railways that run round the nursery from
Monte Carlo to Paris with all the stations marked; no dolls that are
so like fashionable women that you are given a manicure set with
them to keep their nails tidy; no miniature motor-cars that run of
themselves and go for miles round the floor without being wound up.
Jeremy knew none of these things, and was the happier that he did
not. To such a boy such a village was a miracle. . . . It had not
come from Germany, as Aunt Amy said, but from heaven. But it was
even more of Uncle Samuel than the village that he was thinking.
When they started--Helen, Mary and he in charge of the Jampot--upon
their afternoon walk, he was still asking himself the same
questions. How had Uncle Samuel known so exactly? Had it been a
great trouble to bring from so far away? Had Uncle Samuel thought it
bad of him not to thank him?