Mother, having assiduously attended to her brood to the exclusion of anything else, needed to concern herself with running the house, so that upon signs of incipient recovery in the bedrooms, she thought of going out on errands for an hour. She considered the prospect with some trepidation. When two years before the four lads had been left alone, one son's forward facing slide down the banister had proved excessively ambitious, and had terminated with a cannonball crash onto a table below the railing. A smoky fire had been lighted under a shut chimney flue, to be smothered with a blanket when the flames began licking at the wooden mantle and spewing soot up the wall. In the mayhem, the family dog, a mighty mongrel whose genetic mix contributed nothing whatsoever to the betterment of the species, had contrived to steal the dinner roast from the kitchen table. Beatings had been distributed in proportion to the destruction; and the dog had been exiled forevermore to guard duty in some distant factory. Father had been travelling on business then, as now. Still, mother had little choice but to shop for provisions, and to hope that the passing years, in tandem with her strident admonitions, would have inculcated a modicum of responsibility in the eldest children, however refractory the juvenile gloss on their powers of reason. After rumblings of dire consequences to come, as from a cumulo-nimbus cloud, she bolted the door and left.

Within minutes, a bedroom had been converted into a staging ground for aerial assaults. The beds served as springy launch pads from which the bouncing boys could obtain sufficient height to fly across nearly the entire room when duly propelled at their zeniths by lateral shoves. Pillows on the floor, missed as often as hit, provided the targets. The game evolved into a bombing match where boys on two of the beds took random leaps, trying to crush their brethren sneaking under a blanket stretched between. The leapers either smashed upon a sibling's back, or knocked themselves silly on the floorboards. So great were the attractions of the sport that attempts to take control of the blanket provoked a scrap. This evolved into a game of whip, wherein three boys raced through the halls pulling on the blanket's one end, while the fourth clutched the trailing edge for the ride of his life, sailing around corners and banging with stunning reverberations along the corridor walls.

Eclectic interests subsequently took some to an exploration of their parents' most reclusive cupboards, while others hunted for delicacies high on pantry shelves, or plumbed the depths of china-closet drawers. Nothing worthy of more than casual attention was discovered until a small, velvet box brought all together to inspect its hidden cache of unusual objects. More fascinating than pearls were tiny milk teeth rolling in the plush, shining with minute, chiselled crowns like faceted jewels. The deciduous momenti of an earlier age were irresistible. The boys tapped them like hammers: toe, tac, tic. The spoils needed dividing among them. Personal possession of matches had been outlawed in the house; yet nothing prevented the brothers from rummaging to find a few thumb-sized boxes, dumping the unstruck contents into the fireplace's cold remnants, and using the little containers as miniature treasure chests. Careful to cover their work, the lads packed the unneeded matches in clusters beneath the dead coals. The sound of mother entering the drive sparked a dash upstairs, where in less than ten seconds the beds were put in order and furnished with occupants.

That night, two of the fevers had fallen extinct, but two roared anew. As an internal furnace poured droplets through the eldest boy's skin, he saw the purloined baby teeth, his in the instance, explode like grains in a fire. Bony dice, the crowns jiggled and jumped, popped and rattled out from the flames. When at last a clammy ague had come over him, the shivering boy rose, and wrapping himself in a blanket, crept to the hearth. He extracted from the ashes a few handfuls of live matches, doused them with water, and with a shaking arm deposited them in a rubbish bin. Once again in his bed, he imagined the infant teeth returned to their box, and ran his tongue over the adult set in his gums. He then slid into slumber on the extended gliding of a placid mind.