Note 27 — Chapter Seventeen

I remember walking across the Tarkington pastures one day and encountering Davey, with Teddy and Grime minding his sheep, lying stomach-flat on a rock, reading an old book of mine which he had dug out of gracious knows where, and which seemed to be causing him some bewilderment and no great entertainment. “Five Little Peppers and How They Grew?” he said, looking up at me with his small, square, intent face, and a quality of eye-strain in his gaze that was later in life to cause him bad headaches, “Gee—I thought this was a story of the way pepper grows—and here it’s nothing but the name of a lot of folks.” He had picked the book on the assumption that it was on botany. There were years, watching Davey grow, when I sometimes thought of him as becoming a horticulturist.