“All right,” said his father.

His father looked down at him.

His father finished and stood up.

“You don’t know,” said his father.

Nick held the basin for his father.

Dick Boulton turned to Nick’s father.

Ought to have a look at the proud father.

“All right. Come on, then,” his father said.

Nick lay back with his father’s arm around him.

“No. I haven’t any anaesthetic,” his father said.

“Now,” his father said, “there’s some stitches to put in.”

He was looking away so as not to see what his father was doing.

They were seated in the boat, Nick in the stern, his father rowing.

Nick watched his father’s hands scrubbing each other with the soap.

“There. That gets it,” said his father and put something into the basin.

Dick Boulton came from the Indian camp to cut up logs for Nick’s father.

While his father washed his hands very carefully and thoroughly, he talked.

His father picked the baby up and slapped it to make it breathe and handed it to the old woman.

Nick’s father ordered some water to be put on the stove, and while it was heating he spoke to Nick.

She screamed just as Nick and the two Indians followed his father and Uncle George into the shanty.

Nick’s father went into the kitchen and poured about half of the water out of the big kettle into a basin.

“I’m terribly sorry I brought you along, Nickie,” said his father, all his postoperative exhilaration gone.

Nick and his father got in the stern of the boat and the Indians shoved it off and one of them got in to row.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.

Nick, standing in the door of the kitchen, had a good view of the upper bunk when his father, the lamp in one hand, tipped the Indian’s head back.

I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him⁠—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father’s office.

I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War.

I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

Nick’s father always assumed that this was what would happen, and hired the Indians to come down from the camp and cut the logs up with the crosscut saw and split them with a wedge to make cord wood and chunks for the open fireplace.

The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.