Page:Dorothy Canfield--Hillsboro People.djvu/235

 zey cannot know how hard is eet to be a mozzer, wizout a one grand'mere, or oncle."

So J. M. at the end of his first fortnight in Woodville found himself undisputed umpire in all the games, discussions, quarrels, and undertakings of seven young Irish-Americans and more French-Canadian-Americans than he could count. He never did find out exactly how many Loyettes there were. The untidy front yard, littered with boxes and barrels, assumed a strangely different aspect to him as he learned its infinite possibilities for games and buildings and imaginations generally. Sometimes it was a village with a box as house for each child, ranged in streets and lanes, and then Uncle Jerry was the mayor and had to make the laws. Sometimes the yard foamed and heaved in salt waves as, embarked in caravels, the expedition for the discovery of America (out of the older children's history-books) dashed over the Atlantic. It is needless to state that Uncle Jerry was Christopher Columbus.

Both the grateful mothers whom he was relieving cried out that never had there been such peace as since he came, not only because the children could appeal to him for decisions instead of running to their mothers, but because, the spectacular character in every game belonging to him as "company," there were no more quarrels between Mike and Pierre about the leadership. J. M. could not seem to find his old formal personality for weeks after Mike's baseball had knocked it out of him, and in the meantime he submitted, meekly at first and later with an absurd readiness, to being an Indian chieftain, and the head of the fire department, and the principal of a big public school, and the colonel of a regiment,