Free Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway

before I would spook. I was spooked of the saddle horn. Oh the hell with it. I was spooked.”
    “Papa, do we actually have to go goggle-fishing?” Andrew asked.
    “Not if it’s too rough.”
    “Who decides if it’s too rough?”
    “I decide.”
    “Good,” Andy said. “It certainly looks too rough to me.”
    “Papa, have you still got Old Paint out at the ranch?” Andy asked.
    “I believe so,” Thomas Hudson said. “I rented the ranch, you know.”
    “Really?”
    “Yes. The end of last year.”
    “But we can still go there, can’t we?” David asked quickly.
    “Oh sure. We have the big cabin on the beach down by the river.”
    “The ranch is the best place I was ever at,” Andy said. “Outside of here, of course.”
    “I thought you used to like Rochester best,” David teased him. That was where he used to be left with his nurse when she stayed with her family in the summer months when the other boys went west.
    “I did, too. Rochester was a wonderful place.”
    “Do you remember when we came home that fall the time we killed the three grizzlies and you tried to tell him about it, Dave, and what he said?” Thomas Hudson asked.
    “No, papa. I can’t remember exactly that far back.”
    “It was in the butler’s pantry where you guys ate and you were having children’s supper and telling him about it and Anna was saying, ‘Oh my gracious, David, that must have been exciting. And what did you do then ?’ and this wicked old man, he must have been about five or six then, spoke up and said, ‘Well that’s probably very interesting, David, to people who are interested in that sort of thing. But we don’t have grizzlies in Rochester.’ ”
    “See, horseman?” David said. “How you were then?”
    “All right, papa,” Andrew said. “Tell him about when he would read nothing but the funny papers and read funny papers on the trip through the Everglades and wouldn’t look at anything after he went to that school the fall we were in New York and got to be a heel.”
    “I remember it,” David said. “Papa doesn’t have to tell it.”
    “You came out of it all right,” Thomas Hudson said.
    “I had to, I guess. It certainly would have been something pretty bad to have stayed in.”
    “Tell them about when I was little,” young Tom said, rolling over and taking hold of David’s ankle. “I’ll never get to be as good in real life as the stories about me when I was little.”
    “I knew you when you were little,” Thomas Hudson said. “You were quite a strange character then.”
    “He was just strange because he lived in strange places,” the smallest boy said. “I could have been strange in Paris and Spain and Austria.”
    “He’s strange now, horseman,” David said. “He doesn’t need any exotic backgrounds.”
    “What’s exotic backgrounds?”
    “What you haven’t got.”
    “I’ll bet I’ll have them, then.”
    “Shut up and let papa tell,” young Tom said. “Tell them about when you and I used to go around together in Paris.”
    “You weren’t so strange then,” Thomas Hudson said. “As a baby you were an awfully sound character. Mother and I used to leave you in the crib that was made out of a clothes basket in that flat where we lived over the sawmill and F. Puss the big cat would curl up in the foot of the basket and wouldn’t let anybody come near you. You said your name was G’Ning G’Ning and we used to call you G’Ning G’Ning the Terrible.”
    “Where did I get a name like that?”
    “Off a street car or an autobus I think. The sound the conductor made.”
    “Couldn’t I speak French?”
    “Not too well then.”
    “Tell me about a little later by the time I could speak French.”
    “Later on I used to wheel you in the carriage, it was a cheap, very light, folding carriage, down the street to the Closerie des Lilas where we’d have breakfast and I’d read the paper and you’d watch everything that went past on the boulevard. Then we’d