A Man and a Woman | Page 3

summer there was a dense greenness
everywhere, and in autumn a great blaze of scarlet and yellow leaves.
There was an outlined flower garden in front of the house, made in
virgin soil, and with the stumps of trees, close-hewn, still showing
above the surface. Beside the door were what they called "bouncing
Betties" and "old hen and chickens," and on each side of a short
pathway, that led to what was as yet little more than a trail through the
wood, were bunches of larkspur and phlox and old-fashioned pinks and
asters, and there were a few tall hollyhocks and sunflowers standing
about as sentinels. The wild flowers all about were so close to these
that all their perfumes blended, and the phlox and pinks could see their
own cousins but a few feet away. The short path ran through a clump of
bushes but a few yards from the creek. In these bushes song-sparrows
and "chippy-birds" built their nests.
In the doorway of the little house by the forests edge stood, one
afternoon in summer, a young man. He was what might perhaps be
termed an exceedingly young man, as his sixth birthday was but lately
attained, and his stature and general appearance did not contradict his
age. His apparel was not, strictly speaking, in keeping with the glory of
the general scene. His hat had been originally of the quality known as
"chip," but the rim was gone, and what remained had an air of abandon
about it. His clothing consisted of two garments, a striped, hickory shirt
and trousers of blue drilling. The trousers were supported by
suspenders, home-made, of the same material. Sometimes he wore but
one. It saved trouble. He was barefooted. He stood with a hand in each
pocket, his short legs rather wide apart, and looked out upon the
landscape. His air was that of a large landed proprietor, one, for
instance, who owned the earth.
This young man under consideration had not been in society to any
great extent, and of one world had seen very little. Of another he knew
a great deal, for his age. With people of the sort who live in towns he
was unacquainted, but with nature's people he was on closer terms. He

had a great friend and crony in a person who had been a teacher, and
who had come to this frontier life from a broader field. This person was
his mother. With his father he was also on a relationship of familiarity,
but the father was, necessarily, out with his axe most of the time, and
so it came that the young man and his mother were more literally
growing up together with the country. To her he went with such
problems as his great mind failed to solve, and he had come to have a
very good opinion of her indeed. Not that she was as wise as he in
many things; certainly not. She did not know how the new woodchuck
hole was progressing, nor where the coon tracks were thickest along the
creek, nor where the woodpecker was nesting; but she was excessively
learned, nevertheless, and could be relied upon in an emergency. He
approved of her, decidedly. Besides, he remembered her course on one
occasion when he was in a great strait. He was but three years old then,
but he remembered all about it. It was, in fact, this occurrence which
had given him his hobby.
The young man had a specialty. He had several specialties, but to one
yielded all the rest. He had an eye to chipmunks, and had made most
inefficient traps for them and hoped some day to catch one, but they
were nothing to speak of. As for the minnows in the creek, had he not
caught one with a dipper once, and had he not almost hit a big pickerel
with a stone? He knew where the liverwort and anemones grew most
thickly in the spring and had gathered fragrant bunches of them daily,
and he knew, too, of a hollow where there had been a snowy sheet of
winter-green blossoms earlier, and where there would soon be an
abundance of red berries such as his mother liked. At beech-nut
gathering, in the season, he admitted no superior. As for the habits of
the yellow-birds, particularly at the season when they were feeding
upon thistle-seed and made a golden cloud amid the white one as they
drifted with the down, well, he was the only one who really knew
anything about it! Who but he could take the odd-shaped pod of the
wild fleur-de-lis, the common flag, and, winding it up in the flag's own
long, narrow leaf, holding one end, and throwing the pod sling-wise,
produce a sound through the air