He nodded vigorously, packing the tobacco into his pipe.
"Fresh air," said Mac, who slept out on the porch half the year.
"Oh there's plenty of fresh air in Atlantic Avenue," he said. "I had something else in mind." He looked thoughtful, and then his face lighted up with an extremely vivid indignation. It died away again in a moment, but it transfigured him. "Automobiles," he added.
We nodded, understanding him perfectly. We had seen them, in New York as in Brooklyn, careering at maniacal speed among the children at play. Bill, who loved children almost as much as flowers, had come in one day in Lexington Avenue, white and sick, and told us brokenly of something she had seen. So we nodded and he, seeing that we understood, said no more.
"Have you lived in America long?" I inquired.
"Both the kids were born here," he replied. "Yes, that's nearly eight years since we came. You see--but it's a long story. I don't know whether you'd be interested----"
"Let us go outside," she said. "It's beautifully warm."
"You must take the Fourth Chair," said Bill, looking at us.
We explained to him the legend of the Fourth Chair.
"You see," I added, "we were expecting you. There is fate in this."
For a long time he sat quietly looking across the valley, as though pondering something.
"I think I might as well begin at the beginning," he said at last, "and work up to the kids' names gradually. Though as a matter of fact I could tell you in two words the reasons for giving them such un-English names, it wouldn't explain how I feel. And that I take it is what you are after?"
"So I will. I told you I was born at sea. My father was a merchant skipper of Boston. I don't remember him very well, for he died when I was seven, but I have a vague sort of an idea that he was a big man with big dark eyes and a great nose like the beak of a bird. _He_ had run away to sea when--well, Napoleon was Emperor of the French when he ran away to sea. Sailors had pigtails and all the rest of it. His brothers did the same. At one time, in the 'sixties, there were six skippers ploughing the ocean, all Carvilles, all big black-whiskered men. You may hear of them yet in the ports out East.
"My father married four times. There was one peculiarity, or fatality if you like, about the Carvilles, and that was their failure to beget sons. Daughters came right along all the time. I have fourteen cousins, all married, and all got boys! The first three wives my father had only produced two daughters, who died before their mothers. You can understand that those six big men took it badly there were no sons. When the third wife died, childless, my father had given up the sea for a while and had invested in a ship-yard at St. John, New Brunswick. It was there that he met my mother.