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sauna.”
    “Let’s brew some hot camellia sinensis , then.”
    “Huh?” Angelica said.
    “Tea! You have some, don’t you?”
     
    ***
     
    “Passable,” Giselle said.
    Now in the living room, she sipped a cup of green tea while trying to relax on a gray leather couch that had a large and inexplicable knob in the middle, which she avoided. At last she decided to sit on the floor.
    “You know you can cook or ferment tea leaves,” she said, “and get other flavors. Oolong is roasted. And Earl Grey is spiked with bergamot, whatever that is. Probably some plant that’s insanely touchy and difficult to grow, like coffee bushes.”
    Coffee was too hard to grow in Ohio, but they were able to grow tea shrubs in large pots, which could be rolled inside in winter. They pinched off young, green leaves to brew.
    “Or, Maker forbid, you could actually buy some professionally made tea,” she said.
    “You mean with money?” asked Angelica, who drank warm milk with honey. She didn’t care for tea.
    “No, with shiny rocks. Of course I mean money.”
    “Dad doesn’t like money. He says it has no value and might even be evil.”
    A burst of laughter struck Giselle so that she accidentally spewed some tea into the air.
    “‘Money is the root of all evil,’” she said, then grinned conspiratorially. “I have some. Want to see it?”
    Brother and sister glanced at each other.
    “Sure,” said Will. “Couldn’t hurt.”
    “How’d you get it?” Angelica asked.
    “That’s the strange part,” Giselle told them. “I was riding my bicycle around town the other day when I saw a tortoise in a flower bed. It was so little and pretty, with this odd yellow design on the shell that looked like caribou antlers. Anyway, it was very still, and I wasn’t sure if it was alive or made of clay. So I sat down to watch it, to see if it would move.
    “Apparently I was there some time, and people walking by on the sidewalk put money in my bicycle’s basket. Take a look.”
    From the pocket of her gray, homespun dress she produced a handful of crumpled papers and metal disks. Will and Angelica leaned in to examine them. Rectangular and printed in green and black, the papers had symbols, numbers, and men’s faces on them.
    “That’s twenty-nine ‘dollars’ in paper money,” their cousin explained. “These coins all together are worth two hundred and seventeen ‘cents.’”
    “Dollars and cents,” Will said. “I’ve heard about that but never really understood.”
    “It’s a dual system, I think. Dollars are for larger purchases, and cents are for little things, like gum or wingnuts.”
    “What’s with the eye on the pyramid?” asked Angelica, mystified. She’d seen money before but never this close.
    “Who knows? It’s kind of creepy.”
    “This is what they use to get things?”
    “Yeah, like kaffee, which your father buys at the store. I’ve seen the cans in your kitchen.”
    “No,” Will said. “He won’t touch money. He trades for what we need. Or he repairs steam boilers and fixes the old engines at the Mad River Railroading Museum. Then, people give him his kaffee and other stuff.”
    “Like herrings,” Angelica added.
    “Why doesn’t he just use money?” their cousin said. “Money represents time, skill and effort. The more of that you put out, the more money you get, which you can then use to get the products of other peoples’ time, skill and effort, like a decent cup of tea.”
    “Because money’s bad and worthless,” Angelica retorted. “If people just gave it to you because you were staring at a tortoise, it must be.”
    “I think they felt sorry for me because my dress was homemade, I had no shoes, and my bicycle had been welded together from parts of other broken bicycles. Oh, it was real, by the way.”
    “What?” Will asked.
    “Velocitus!” she said with a smile, pulling a tiny tortoise from her pocket and putting it on the table next to the money. “That’s what I’ve