_aches_ long before that Easter day when you
were born."

"Always too fresh, Leo," Ambrosch re-
marked with a shrug.

Leo dived behind his mother and grinned
out at me.

We turned to leave the cave; Antonia and
I went up the stairs first, and the children
waited. We were standing outside talking,
when they all came running up the steps to-
gether, big and little, tow heads and gold
heads and brown, and flashing little naked
legs; a veritable explosion of life out of the
dark cave into the sunlight. It made me dizzy
for a moment.

The boys escorted us to the front of the
house, which I hadn't yet seen; in farmhouses,
somehow, life comes and goes by the back
door. The roof was so steep that the eaves
were not much above the forest of tall holly-
hocks, now brown and in seed. Through July,
Antonia said, the house was buried in them;
the Bohemians, I remembered, always planted
hollyhocks. The front yard was enclosed by
a thorny locust hedge, and at the gate grew
two silvery, moth-like trees of the mimosa
family. From here one looked down over the

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