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window, which commanded a clear view of the Enchanted Mountain (which was, to tell the truth, only a pretty high hill), the Monks were gratified to spy a trickle of furtive figures already sneaking around its base toward the field that had thus far always been thought of as the more insignificant part of the Hunniker Land Grant.
    Each of them shouldered a shovel, a mattock, or a spading fork. Some of them carried all three.
    “Goody,” Dittany gloated, “they’re already snapping at the bait. That was brilliant of you, dear. Now that you’ve taken care of your civic responsibility for the day, how’d you like to stay here with the kids and round up your elk while I beard Arethusa about Polly James?”
    “If you’re sure you wouldn’t mind, darling.” Any excuse to dodge a meeting with his Aunt Arethusa was welcome to Osbert. “I really should get down to work, now that I have a family to support.”
    “Indeed you do, and it won’t be long before the twins will have outgrown their booties and be clamoring for Reeboks. Doesn’t it break your heart, dear, how fast they grow up?”
    Osbert clasped his wife to his bosom and began exploring with his lips the little dimple beside her mouth.
    “Awful, sweetheart. We’ll soon be facing an empty nest.
    What shall we do without our wee ones racing their ponies up and down the stairs?”
    “Never mind, darling, we’ll still have each other. And Annie and Rennie will be coming home for the holidays with their own sets of twins. Just think how this old house will ring with merriment as we sit in our rocking chairs and listen to the patter of our grandkiddies’ feet. Maybe we ought to buy another rocking chair and start breaking it in.”
    “Couldn’t we wait awhile?” Osbert demurred. “Frankly, rocking chairs always make me feel as if I’m going to be seasick, though I expect you’ll despise me as a weakling for saying so.”
    “Pooh! I’ll bet you could make a pride of African lions look like a litter of kittens if you took the notion. Only I’d as soon you didn’t till the twins are a little older. Go ahead with your elk, darling. I’d better whiz over to Arethusa’s before Polly James shows up without his divining rod and we’re stuck for another day.”

CHAPTER
People
    who didn’t know
    Arethusa and Osbert Monk very well naturally supposed that two writers of the same family, living so close together, would spend a good many pleasant hours together talking shop about apostrophe, hyperbole, synecdoche, and other mysteries of their profession. In fact, the aunt and the nephew seldom talked amicably for long about anything at all. The only writing-related subject they fully agreed on was that typewriters were better than word processors.
     
    Typewriters gave instant gratification. You poked the keys, you looked at your paper, and there was a word. It might be misspelled, it might have got garbled in the typing, it might even be the wrong word; but there it was, by golly, and you didn’t need to fry your eyeballs on a dinky little screen and go through a lot of technical gyrations that probably wouldn’t have worked anyway to get the word into your clutches and gloat over it.
    Furthermore, typewriters clicked. When you were sitting all alone with a piece of blank paper and an even blanker mind, that familiar click could be welcome company, like a cricket on the hearth. Before you knew it, one click would have led to another and there you’d be, clicking off metaphor and simile right and left, switching painlessly from passive verb to active verb, from proper noun to mildly improper noun, popping quaint images straight from your subconscious to your fingers, lured forth by the magical rhythm of the click.
    While Osbert’s faithful old Remington standard often clicked at a pace that suggested a herd of longhorns in full stampede, Arethusa’s svelte rose-colored electric was more inclined to lilt along at approximately the tempo of a Viennese waltz or