Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/24

 one. The Crittendens were Unitarians, not much given to church-going anywhere, and the nearest Unitarian church was across the river in New York. Mr. Crittenden had enough of New York on week-days. So they never went. Few of the Union Hill families did. Union Hill was anything but a stronghold of Sabbatarianism. It considered Sunday rather as a heaven-sent opportunity for much comfortable beer-drinking, attendance on a Turn-verein, and for enormous family gatherings around a big dinner.

For Neale, with no other children in the family, the day was always solitary; not unpleasantly so. It was a day for long imaginings, stirring, warlike imaginings, realized through lead soldiers. Lead soldiers were a passion of his little boyhood. He had two hundred and ten, counting the ones with their legs broken, that he had mounted on half corks. He did not move them around much. He did not knock them down. When he got them set up in the order he wished, he fell into a trance, imagining stories and incidents. It took a long time to get them arranged to his satisfaction, with stiff marching columns, at shoulder-arms in the middle, some Indian sharpshooters prone or kneeling behind painted lead shrubbery but in front, a squadron of parade cavalry on one wing, a troop of galloping Arabs on the other. Always he had a pile of blocks behind which a coal-black charger was tethered, and on top, leaning against a spool of thread, stood the general surveying his army. By uniform and whiskers the toy-maker had intended the figure for Kaiser Wilhelm I; but to the boy's eyes it was no Prussian king, but Neale—Neale commanding his victorious troops. It was all arranged with a careful hand and a loving heart, and it took a long, long time.

Very often the dinner-bell rang before he had even finished setting them up. At Sunday dinner there was generally "company," men friends of Father's mostly, but sometimes husbands and wives. Neale knew all their names, and shook hands without self-consciousness. He grinned silently if they spoke to him, and retired to his shell, busying himself with his own thoughts, all concentrated on the impending battle.