The Bridgeport times and evening farmer., 1922-12-21

\ steps His arms were full of
 field flowers. He stood there staring over his burden.
 A hush fell upon tea and card tables. The younger women on the Strang veranda glanced at one another The girl at the piano hesitated in her light stringing of musical sentences.
 John Strang rose. Not now, Gargoyle, old man." Taking the flowers from the thin hands, he laid them on the rug at his wife's feet, then gently motioned the in truder away. Gargoyle fitted down the broad steps to the smooth drive, and was soon hidden by masses of rhododendron on the quadrangle
 Only one guest raised question ing eyebrows as Strang resumed ~ his seat This girl glanced over his shoulder at the aimless child staying off into the trees.
 'I should think an uncanny little person like that would get on Mrs. Strang's nerves; he gives me the creeps!"
 Yes? Mrs. Strang is hardly as sensitive as you might suppose. What do you say of a lady who enjoys putting the worms on her shrinking husbands hook? Not only that, but who banters the worms, telling them it's all for their own good7"
 The mistress of Heartholm. looking over at the two, shook a deprecating head. But StranS seem to derive amusement from the guests disapproval.
 Mockwood, where the Strangs lived, had it's impressiveness partly accounted for by the practical American name of residential park" This habitat, covering many thousands of acres, gave eVi- dence of the usual New World DSIhCSh AohNe1SNAS wealth and over-reaching restraint. 1 Poli h e d automobiles gliding noiselessly through massed purple and silver shrubberies, recede1 | into bland glooms of well-thought-I 1 out boscage The architecture, a 1 judicious mixture of naughty roofs 1 and opulent chimneys, preened it 1 self behind exclusive screens of l wall and vine, and the entire front ! age of Mockwood presented a polished elegance which did not entirely conceal a silent plausibil- ity of expense.
 A T Heartholm. the Strang's "A place. alone; had the purely A A conventional been smitten in it's smooth face The bankers 1 country home was built on the | lines of his own physical height i and mental breadth. Strang had flung open his livfng-rooms to : vfstas of tree branches splashing | against the morning blue. His 1 back stairs were as aspiring as the 1 Apostles Creed, and his front stairs as soaring as the Canticle to the Sun. As he had laid out his f seven mile drive on a deer track leading to a forest spring, so had he spoken for his flowers the word, which, though it freed them from the prunes and prisms of land scape gardener, held them, glori- fled vassals, to their original mas ters, sun and rain.
 Strang and his love for untram- neied nature were hard pills for Mockwooders to swallow. Here was a man who, while he kept one on the alert, was to be deplored; i who homesteaded squirrels, gave rabbits their own licentious ways, was whimsically tolerant of lich- ems, mushrooms, and vagabond vines. This was also the man who, when his gardeners wife gave birth to a deaf and dumb baby, en- coura ged his own wife to make Q pet of the unfortunate youngster. and when he could walk gave him his freedom of the Heartholm acres.
 It was this sort of things, Mock wooders agreed, that explained" the Strangs. It was the desultory gossip of fashionable breakfast tables how Evelyn Strang was ire quently seen as the gardeners cot tage, talking to the poor mother about her youngest. The gsrdener's wife had other children, all strong and hearty These went to school. survived the rigors of regents" examinations. and were beginning to talk of accepting" positions. There would never be any position for little Gargoyle, as John Strang 1 called him, to accept"
 Let the child run about" the doctors had advised. Let him run about in the sun and