After this, I think, he was as bewitching as the laddie in the
barrel to her - Was he not always a laddie in the barrel himself,
climbing in for apples while we all stood around, like gamins,
waiting for a bite? He was the spirit of boyhood tugging at the
skirts of this old world of ours and compelling it to come back and
play. And I suppose my mother felt this, as so many have felt it:
like others she was a little scared at first to find herself
skipping again, with this masterful child at the rope, but soon she
gave him her hand and set off with him for the meadow, not an
apology between the two of them for the author left behind. But
near to the end did she admit (in words) that he had a way with him
which was beyond her son. 'Silk and sacking, that is what we are,'
she was informed, to which she would reply obstinately, 'Well,
then, I prefer sacking.'

'But if he had been your son?'

'But he is not.'

'You wish he were?'

'I dinna deny but what I could have found room for him.'

And still at times she would smear him with the name of black (to
his delight when he learned the reason). That was when some podgy
red-sealed blue-crossed letter arrived from Vailima, inviting me to
journey thither. (His directions were, 'You take the boat at San
Francisco, and then my place is the second to the left.') Even
London seemed to her to carry me so far away that I often took a