My pride grew with the melon and, by and by, my uncle tried to express the extent and nature of my riches by calling me a mellionaire.
I didn't know much about myself those days except the fact that my name was Bart Baynes and, further, that I was an orphan who owned a watermelon and a little spotted hen and lived on Rattle road in a neighborhood called Lickitysplit.

I lived with my Aunt Deel and my Uncle Peabody Baynes on a farm.

They were brother and sister--he about thirty-eight and she a little beyond the far-distant goal of forty.
My father and mother died in a scourge of diphtheria that swept the neighborhood when I was a boy of five.

For a time my Aunt Deel seemed to blame me for my loss.
"No wonder they're dead," she used to say, when out of patience with me and--well I suppose that I must have had an unusual talent for all the noisy arts of childhood when I broke the silence of that little home.
The word "dead" set the first mile-stone in the long stretch of my memory.

That was because I tried so hard to comprehend it and further because it kept repeating its challenge to my imagination.