Page:I Know a Secret (1927).pdf/171

 at your front door! He used to come and sit on an old stump and smoke his pipe and wish the children would hurry up and grow big enough to hunt tadpoles. I was a tadpole myself at that time, and it rather worried me.

"When I consider that my family have lived here for so many generations—even before the Union Mortgage Company—it amuses me to think of Mr. Mistletoe feeling so proprietory about our pond. He always had a comic belief that he was a pioneer in these parts. He used to say, 1620 the Pilgrims settled in New England, 1920 the Mistletoes settled in the Roslyn Estates. But I have a kindly feeling toward him, because, though it is not generally known, I actually lived in his house for a while. He couldn't wait for the children to grow up to the age of tadpole-hunting so he went in wading and caught some himself. I was one of them. He put us in a milk bottle and took us home with him. He said it made him feel young again to have tadpoles in the dining room. I was afraid he meant he was going to eat us. But apparently he regarded us merely as a decoration: we were kept in a bowl in the dining-room window for some time. Then, when our legs began to grow, he took us back to the pond. That was