Chapter III: Part 3

At the entrance to one of the tunnels he saw John’s canvas overalls, his pick and shovel, a gold-pan, and a wheelbarrow of home construction. Jack examined the latter and saw that the only shop-made part of it was the wheel, an old one which John must have found, and that John by his own ingenuity had added the other parts out of such materials as he could find.

The sight of these things, lying unused and unclaimed by their owner, made Jack feel more dismal than ever. The overalls, in particular, were like a picture of John himself. The whole place began to seem strange and awesome.

Jack crept into the short tunnels, where it was light even at the far end; and he saw nothing there, either to explain or to add to his fears. But the long tunnel was as black as night. Into that he dared not go.

He looked once more at the dreary little heap of tools and clothing, and with an ache that was partly in his heart, partly no doubt in the empty region of his stomach, he climbed down again into the gulch, mounted Lollo and rode away.

When he came to the bad place on the trail, he slid down, keeping ahead of Lollo, who shuffled along cautiously behind him. Lollo would not have stepped on Jack, but he might have slipped and fallen on him. However, a cayuse on a bad trail attends strictly to business, and is quite safe if he can keep but two of his feet on firm ground.

If Jack’s father had known about that place on the trail he never would have sent Jack by that way; and it was well that his mother had no notion of it. As it was, they were merely surprised to see the boy returning about the middle of the hottest part of the afternoon, and were not a little sorry for his disappointment when they heard the story of the trip.

Mrs. Gilmour shared the boy’s anxiety about John; and Charley Moy, while he was giving Jack his dinner, told some very painful stories of miners done away with on their solitary claims for the sake of their supposed earnings. Mr. Gilmour said there might be a dozen explanations of John’s absence; and, moreover, that Jack hadn’t found the camp at all, and the camp should be there, or some sign of its having been there must remain to indicate the spot.

Still the boy could not dismiss his fears, until two or three days later John himself stopped at the cañon, on his way to town, not only alive but in excellent health and spirits.

He told Jack that he _had_ been at his camp all the time the boy was searching for him; but the camp was at the mouth of the gulch, close to the river, where he had found a spring of pure cold water. Very near the spring was a miner’s shanty, deserted but still quite habitable. The advantages of house and spring together had decided John to camp there, instead of higher up and nearer to his ditches. He urged Jack to make the trip again, and in a week or so the boy repeated his visit.

This time he did not take the upper trail. John said that that trail was only used at high water in the spring, when the river rose above the lower trail.

The lower trail along the river bank was safe and pleasant, and not so hot as the upper one; and this time there were no adventures. Adventures do very well to tell of afterward, but they do not always make a happy journey.

John was at home, and seemed very glad to see the boy. He took him up on the bluffs to show him his workings, and Jack found it very different, up there by the tunnels,--not at all strange and anxious. He did not mind the dark tunnel a bit, with John’s company and a candle to guide him.

John showed him the under surface of the bluffs, exposed where he had undermined them and scraped away the dirt. These lava bluffs were once a boiling flood of melted rock. The ground it flowed over and rested upon after it cooled had been the bed of a river. In its soft state the lava had taken the impression of the surface of the river-bed, and after it cooled the forms remained the same; so that the under surface of these ancient bluffs was like a plaster cast of the ancient river-bed. The print could be seen of stones smoothed by water, and some of the stones were still embedded in the lava crust.

Now this river came down from the mountains, where every prospector in Idaho knows there is plenty of gold for those who can discover it. John argued that the old river-bed must have had, mixed with its sand, fine gold for which no one had ever prospected. The new bed which the river had worn for itself at the foot of the bluffs probably contained quite as much gold, sunk between stones or lodged in potholes in the rocks (as it lodges against the riffles in a sluice-box), but no one could hope to get _that_ gold, for the water which covered it. The old river-bed was covered only with rock, which “stays put” while you dig beneath it.

So, on the strength of this ingenious theory, John was digging where the other theorists had dug before him. He was not getting rich, but he was “making wages” and enjoying himself in the pleasant camp in the gulch; and as yet he had not found any of the rich holes.

He made a great feast in the boy’s honor. The chief dish was stewed grouse, rolled up in paste and boiled like dumplings. Jack said those grouse dumplings were about the best eating he had ever “struck.” They also had potatoes, baked in the ashes, and canned vegetables and stewed apples and baking-powder biscuits and honey; and to crown the feast, John made a pot of strong black coffee and sweetened it very sweet.

But here the guest was in a quandary. He refused the coffee, because he was not allowed to drink coffee at home; but he could see that his refusal made John uncomfortable, for there was no milk; there was nothing else that he could offer the boy to drink but water, and water seemed very plain at a feast.

Jack wondered which was worse--for a boy to break a rule without permission, or to seem to cast reproach upon a friend’s entertainment by refusing what was set before him. He really did not care for the coffee; it looked very black and bitter; but he cared so much for John that it was hard to keep on refusing. Still, he did refuse, but he did not tell John his reason. Somehow he didn’t think that it would sound manly for a big boy, nearly twelve years old, to say he was forbidden to drink coffee.

Afterward he told his mother about it, and asked her if he had done right. His mother’s opinion was that he had, but that he might have done it in a better way by telling John his reason for refusing the coffee. Then there would have been no danger of John’s supposing that the boy refused because he did not like that kind of coffee.

Jack’s little problem set his mother thinking how often we do what is right, at some cost to ourselves, perhaps, but do it in such an awkward, proud way, that we give pain to others and so undo the value of our honest effort to be good; and how, in the matter of feasts, it is much easier in our time for a guest to decline anything that does not suit him in the way of eating and drinking than it used to be long ago, when a gentleman was thought not to have “dined” unless he had both eaten and drunk more than was good for him; and how, in the matter of rules, it is only little silly boys who are ashamed to confess that they are not their own masters. The bravest and wisest men have been keepers of simple rules in simple matters, and in greater ones respecters of a loving Intelligence above their own, whose laws they were proud to obey.

The courage that displays itself in excesses is happily no longer the fashion; rather the courage that keeps modestly within bounds, and can say “no” without offense to others.

NOVEMBER IN THE CAÑON

The long season of fair autumn weather was drawing to a close. Everybody was tired of sunshine; there had been nearly six months of it, and the face of nature in southern Idaho was gray with dust. A dark morning or a cloudy sunset was welcome, even to the children, who were glad of the prospect of any new kind of weather.

But no rain came. The river had sunk so low in its bed it barely murmured on the rocks, like a sleeper disturbed in his dream. When the children were indoors, with windows shut and fire crackling, they could hear no sound of water; and this cessation of a voice inseparable from the life of the cañon added to the effect of waiting which belonged to these still fall days.

The talk of the men was of matters suited to the season. It was said the Chinamen’s wood-drive had got lodged in Moore’s Creek on its way to the river, there being so little water in the creek this year, and might not get down at all, which would be almost a total loss to the Chinamen. Charley Moy knew the boss Chinaman of the “drive,” and said that he had had bad luck now two seasons running.

The river was the common carrier between the lumber-camps in the mountains and the consumers of wood in the towns and ranches below. Purchasers who lived on the river-bank were accustomed to stop their winter’s supply of firewood as it floated by. It was taken account of and paid for when the owners of the drive came to look up their property.

Every year three drives came down the river. Goodwin’s log-drive came first, at high water, early in the summer. The logs were from twelve to twenty feet long. Each one was marked with the letters M H. These were the first two of Mr. Goodwin’s initials, and were easily cut with an axe; the final initial, G, being difficult to cut in this rude way, was omitted; but everybody knew that saw-logs marked M H belonged to Goodwin’s drive. They looked like torpedo-boats as they came nosing along with an ugly rolling motion through the heavy current.

The men who followed this first drive were rather a picked lot for strength and endurance, but they made slow progress past the bend in the cañon. Here a swift current and an eddy together combined to create what is called a jam. The loggers were often seen up to their waists in water for hours, breaking up the jam and working the logs out into the current. When the last one was off the men would get into their boat--a black, flat-bottomed boat, high at stem and stern like a whaleboat--and go whooping down in mid-current like a mob of schoolboys upon some dangerous sort of lark. These brief voyages between the jams must have been the most exciting and agreeable part of log-driving.

After Goodwin’s drive came the Frenchmen’s cord-wood drive; and last of all, when the river was lowest, came the Chinamen’s drive, making the best of what water was left.

There is a law of the United States which forbids that an alien shall cut timber on the public domain. A Chinaman, being an alien unmistakably and doubly held as such in the West, cannot therefore cut the public timber for his own immediate profit or use; but he can take a contract to furnish it to a white dealer in wood, at a price contingent upon the safe delivery of the wood. But if the river should fail to bring it in time for sale, the cost of cutting and driving, for as far as he succeeds in getting it down, is a dead loss to the Chinese contractor, and the wood belongs to whoever may pick it out of the water when the first rise of the creek in spring carries it out.

The Chinese wood-drivers are singular, wild-looking beings. Often at twilight, when they camped on the shore below the house, the children would hover within sight of the curious group the men made around their fire--an economical bit of fire, sufficient merely to cook the supper of fish and rice.

All is silence before supper, in a camp of hungry, wet white men, but the Chinamen were always chattering. The children were amused to see them “doing” their hair like women,--combing out the long, black, witch-locks in the light of the fire and braiding them into pigtails, or twisting them into “Psyche knots.” They wore several layers of shirts and sleeveless vests, one over another, long waterproof boots drawn up over their knees, and always the most unfitting of hats perched on top of the coiled braids or above the Psyche knots. Altogether, take them wet or dry, on land or in the water, no male or female of the white race could show anything in the way of costume to approach them.

The cloudy weather continued. The nights grew sharper, and the men said it was too cold for rain; if a storm came now it would bring snow. There was snow already upon the mountains and the high pastures, for the deer were seeking feeding-grounds in the lower, warmer gulches, and the stock had been driven down from the summer range to winter in the valleys.

One afternoon an old man, a stranger, was seen coming down the gulch back of the house, followed by a pack-horse bearing a load. The gulch was now all yellow and brown, and the man’s figure was conspicuous for the light, army-blue coat he wore--the overcoat of a private soldier. He “hitched” at the post near the kitchen door, and uncovering his load showed two fat haunches of young venison which he had brought to sell.

No peddler of the olden time, unstrapping his pack in the lonely farmhouse kitchen, could have been more welcome than this stranger with his wild merchandise to the children of the camp. They stood around so as not to miss a word of the conversation while Charley Moy entertained him with the remnants of the camp lunch. The old buckskin-colored horse seemed as much of a character as his master. Both his ears were cropped half off, giving a sullen and pugilistic expression to his bony head. There was no more arch to his neck than to the handle of a hammer. His faded yellow coat was dry, matted and dusty as the hair of a tramp who sleeps in haymows. Without bit or bridle, he followed his master like a dog. In the course of conversation it appeared that the cropped ears were not scars of battle nor marks of punishment, but the record of a journey when he and his master were caught out too late in the season, and the old horse’s ears had both been frozen.

The children were surprised to learn that their new acquaintance was a neighbor, residing in a dugout in Cottonwood Gulch, only three miles away. They knew the place well, had picnicked there one summer day, and had played in the dugout. Had not Daisy, the pet fawn, when they had barred him out of the dugout because he filled up the whole place, jumped upon the roof and nearly stamped it in?--like Samson pulling down the pillars of the temple? But no one had been living there then. The old man said he used the dugout only in winter. It was his town house. In summer he and the old horse took their freedom on the hills, hunting and prospecting for mineral--not so much in the expectation of a fortune as from love of the chances and risks of the life. Was it not lonely in Cottonwood Gulch when the snows came? the children asked. Sometimes it was lonely, but he had good neighbors: the boys at Alexander’s (the horse-ranch) were down from the summer range, and they came over to his place of an evening for a little game of cards, or he went over to their place. He would be very glad, however, of any old newspapers or novels that might be lying around camp; for he was short of reading-matter in the dugout.

There was always a pile of old periodicals and “picture papers” on Charley Moy’s ironing-table; he was proud to contribute his entire stock on hand to the evening company in the dugout. The visitor then modestly hinted that he was pretty tired of wild meat: had Charley such a thing as the rough end of a slab of bacon lying around, or a ham bone to spare? A little mite of lard would come handy, and if he could let him have about five pounds of flour, it would be an accommodation, and save a journey to town. These trifles he desired to pay for with his venison; but that was not permitted, under the circumstances.

Before taking his leave the old hunter persuaded Polly to take a little tour on his horse, up and down the poplar walk, at a slow and courteous pace. Polly had been greatly interested in her new friend at a distance, but this was rather a formidable step toward intimacy. However, she allowed herself to be lifted upon the back of the old crop-eared barbarian, and with his master walking beside her she paced sedately up and down between the leafless poplars.

The old man’s face was pale, notwithstanding the exposure of his life; the blood in his cheek no longer fired up at the touch of the sun. His blue coat and the yellow-gray light of the poplar walk gave him an added pallor. Polly was a pink beside him, perched aloft in her white bonnet and ruffled pinafore.

The old sway-backed horse sulked along, refusing to “take any hand” in such a trifling performance. He must have felt the insult of Polly’s babyish heels dangling against his weather-beaten ribs, that were wont to be decorated with the pendent hoofs and horns of his master’s vanquished game.

Relations between the family and their neighbor in the dugout continued to be friendly and mutually profitable. The old ex-soldier’s venison was better than could be purchased in town. Charley Moy saved the picture papers for him, and seldom failed to find the half of a pie, a cup of cold coffee, or a dish of sweets for him to “discuss” on the bench by the kitchen door. Discovering that antlers were prized in camp, he brought his very best pair as a present, bearing them upon his shoulders, the furry skull of the deer against his own, back to back, so that in profile he was double-headed, man in front and deer behind.

But the young men of the camp were ambitious to kill their own venison. The first light dry snow had fallen, and deer-tracks were discovered on the trails leading to the river. A deer was seen by John Brown and Mr. Dane, standing on the beach on the farther side, in a sort of cul-de-sac formed by the walls of the lava bluffs as they approached the shore. They fired at and wounded him, but he was not disabled from running. His only way of escape was by the river in the face of the enemy’s fire. He swam in a diagonal line down stream, and assisted by the current gained the shore at a point some distance below, which his pursuers were unable to reach in time to head him off.

They followed him over the hills as far and fast as legs and wind could carry them, but lost him finally, owing to the dog Cole’s injudicious barking, when the policy of the men would have been to lie quiet and let the deer rest from his wound. By his track in the snow they saw that his left hind foot touched the ground only now and then. If Cole had pressed him less hard the deer would have lain down to ease his hurt, the wound would have stiffened and rendered it difficult for him to run, and so he might have met his end shortly, instead of getting away to die a slow and painful death.

They lost him, and were reproached for it, needlessly, by the women of the family. One Saturday morning, when Mr. Dane was busy in the office over his notebooks, and Jack’s mother was darning stockings by the fire, Jack came plunging in to say that John Brown was trying to head off a deer that was swimming down the river--and would Mr. Dane come with his rifle, quick?

Below the house a wire-rope suspension bridge for foot passengers only spanned the river at its narrowest point, from rock to rock of the steep shore. Mr. Dane looked out and saw John Brown running to and fro on this bridge, waving his arms, shouting, and firing stones at some object above the bridge that was heading down stream. Mr. Dane could just see the small black spot upon the water which he knew was the deer’s head. He seized his gun and ran down the shore path. Discouraged in his attempt to pass the bridge, the deer was making for the shore, when Mr. Dane began firing at him. A stranger now arrived upon the scene, breathless with running; he was the hunter who had started the game and chased it till it had taken to the river. The deer was struggling with the current in midstream, uncertain which way to turn. Headed off from the bridge and from the nearest shore, he turned and swam slowly toward the opposite bank. The women on the hill were nearly crying, the hunt seemed so hopeless for the deer and so unfair: three men, two of them with guns, combined against him, and the current so swift and strong! It was Mr. Dane’s bullet that ended it. It struck the deer as he lifted himself out of the water on the rocks across the river.

The venison was divided between the stranger who started the game and the men of the camp who cut off its flight and prevented its escape.

The women did not refuse to eat of it, but they continued to protest that the hunt “was not fair;” or, in the phrase of the country, that the deer “had no show at all.”

THE GATES ON GRANDFATHER’S FARM

Little Eastern children, transplanted in their babyhood to the far West, have to leave behind them grandfathers and grandmothers, and all the dear old places associated with those best friends of childhood.

Of our cañon children, Jack was the only one who could remember grandfather’s house, although Polly had romanced about it so much that she thought she could remember. Polly was born there, but as she was taken away only eighteen months afterward, it’s hardly likely that she knew much about it. And Baby was born in the cañon, and never in her life had heard the words grandpapa or grandmamma spoken in the second person.

For the sake of these younger ones, deprived of their natural right to the possession of grandparents, the mother used to tell everything she could put into words and that the children could understand about the old Eastern home where her own childhood was spent, in entire unconsciousness of any such fate as that which is involved in the words “Gone West.”

The catalogue of grandfather’s gates always pleased the children, because in the cañon there were no gates, but the great rock gate of the cañon itself, out of which the river ran shouting and clapping its hands like a child out of a dark room into the sunlight, and into which the sun took a last peep at night under the red curtain of the sunset.

Grandfather’s gates were old gates long before Jack began to kick out the toes of his shoes against them, or practice with their wooden latches and latchpins. Most of them had been patched and strengthened in weak places by hands whose work in this world was done. Each had its own particular creak, like a familiar voice announcing as far as it could be heard which gate it was that was opening; and to Jack’s eyes, each one of the farm gates had a distinct and expressive countenance of its own, which he remembered as well as he did the faces of the men who worked in the fields.

Two or three of them were stubborn obstacles in his path, by reason of queer, unmanageable latches that wouldn’t shove, or weights that a small boy couldn’t lift, or a heavy trick of yawing at the top and dragging at the bottom, so that the only way to get through was to squeeze through a wedge-shaped opening where you scraped the side of your leg and generally managed to catch some part of your clothing on a nail or on a splinter. Others fell open gayly on a down-hill grade, but you had to tug yourself crimson in order to heave them shut again. Very few of those heavy old field gates seemed to have been intended for the convenience of boys. The boy on grandfather’s farm who opened a gate was expected to shut it. If he neglected to do so he was almost sure to hear a voice calling after him, “Hey, there! Who left that gate open?” So on the whole it was no saving of time to slip through, besides being a strain on one’s reputation with the farm hands.

Some of the gates were swinging and creaking every day of the year; others were silent for whole months together; others, like the road gate, stood open always and never creaked, and nobody marked them, except that the children found them good to swing upon when the grass was not too long.

The road gate had once been a smart one, with pickets and gray paint, but it had stood open so many years with the grass of summer after summer cumbering its long stride that no one ever thought of repainting it, any more than they would of decorating the trunk of the Norway spruce which stood nearest to it, between it and the fountain that had ceased to play and had been filled up with earth and converted into a flower bed.

The road gate being always open, it follows that the garden gate was always shut. The garden was divided from the dooryard by the lane that went past the house to the carriage-house and stable. Visitors sometimes spoke of the lane as the “avenue,” and of the dooryard as the “lawn;” but these fine names were never used by grandfather himself, nor by any of the household, nor were they appropriate to the character of the place. The dooryard grass was left to grow rather long before it was cut, like grandfather’s beard before he would consent to have it trimmed. Dandelions went to seed and clover-heads reddened. Beautiful things had time to grow up and blossom in that rich, dooryard grass, before it was swept down by the scythe and carried away in wheelbarrow loads to be fed to the horses. It was toward night, generally, that the men wheeled it away, and the children used to follow load after load to the stable, to enjoy the horses’ enjoyment of it. They always felt that the dooryard grass belonged to them, and yielded it, at the cost of many a joy, as their own personal contribution to those good friends of theirs in the stable--Nelly and Duke and Dan and Nelly’s colt (which was generally a five-year-old before it ceased to be called “the colt”).

The garden gate was a small one, of the same rather smart pattern as the road gate. The grapevine which grew inside the fence--and over, and under, and through it--had superadded an arch of its tenderest, broadest, most luminous leaves, which spanned the gate-posts, uplifted against the blue sky, and was so much more beautiful toward the middle of summer than any gate could be, that no one ever looked at the little garden gate at all, except to make sure that it was shut.

It had a peculiar, lively click of the latch, which somehow suggested all the pleasures of the garden within. The remembrance of it recalls the figure of John, the gardener, in his blue denim blouse, with a bunch of radishes and young lettuces in his clean, earthy hands. He would take a few steps out of his way to the fountain (it had not then been filled up), and wash the tender roots, dip the leaves and shake them, before presenting his offering in the kitchen.

There was another figure that often came and went when the garden gate clicked: the little mother, the children’s grandmother, in her morning gingham and white apron and garden hat, and the gloves without fingers she wore when she went to cut her roses. Sometimes she wore no hat, and the sun shone through her muslin cap. It came to a point just above her forehead, and was finished with a bunch of narrow ribbon, pale straw-color or lavender. Her face in the open sunlight or under the shade of her hat had the tender fairness of one of her own faintly tinted tea-roses. Young girls and children’s faces may be likened to flowers, but that fairness of the white soul shining through does not belong to youth. The soul of a mother is hardly in full bloom until her cheek begins to sink a little and grow soft with age.

The garden was laid out on an old-fashioned plan, in three low terraces, each a single step above the other. A long, straight walk divided the middle terrace, extending from the gate to the seat underneath the grapevine and pear-tree; and another long, straight path crossed the first one at right angles from the blackberry bushes at the top of the garden to the arbor-vitæ hedge at the bottom. The borders were of box, or polyanthus, or primroses, and the beds were filled with a confusion of flowers of all seasons, crowding the spaces between the rose-bushes; so that there where literally layers of flowers, the ones above half hiding, half supporting the ones beneath, and all uniting to praise the hand of the gardener that made them grow. Some persons said the garden needed systematizing; that there was a waste of material there. Others thought its charm lay in its careless lavishness of beauty--as if it took no thought for what it was or had, but gave with both hands and never counted what was left.

It was certain you could pick armfuls, apronfuls, of flowers there, and never miss them from the beds or the bushes where they grew.

The hedge ran along on top of the stone wall that guarded the embankment to the road. In June, when the sun lay hot on the whitening dust, Jack used to lean with his arms deep in the cool, green, springy mass of the hedge, his chin barely above its close-shorn twigs, and stare at the slow-moving tops of the tall chestnut-trees across the meadow, and dream of journeys and of circuses passing, with band wagons and piebald horses and tramp of elephants and zebras with stiff manes. How queer an elephant would look walking past the gate of Uncle Townsend’s meadow!

When the first crop of organ-grinders began to spread along the country roads, Jack, atilt like a big robin in the hedge, would prick his ear at the sound of a faint, whining sweetness, far away at the next house but one. After a silence he would hear it again in a louder strain, at the very next house; another plodding silence, and the joy had arrived. The organ-man had actually perceived grandfather’s house, far back as it was behind the fir-trees, and had stopped by the little gate at the foot of the brick walk. Then Jack races out of the garden, slamming the gate behind him, across the dooryard and up the piazza steps, to beg a few pennies to encourage the man. He has already turned back his blanket and adjusted his stick. Will grandmother please hurry? It takes such a long time to find only four pennies, and the music has begun!

All the neighbors’ children have followed the man, and are congregated about him in the road below. Looks are exchanged between them and Jack, dangling his legs over the brink of the wall, but no words are wasted.

Then come those moments of indecision as to the best plan of bestowing the pennies. If you give them too soon, the man may pack up the rest of his tunes and go away; if you keep them back too long, he may get discouraged and go, anyhow. Jack concludes to give two pennies at the close of the first air, and make the others apparent in his hands. But the organ-man does not seem to be aware of the other two pennies in reserve. His melancholy eyes are fixed on the tops of the fir-trees that swing in a circle above Jack’s head, as he sits on the wall. “Poor man,” Jack thinks, “he is disappointed to get only two pennies! He thinks, perhaps, I am keeping the others for the next man. How good of him to go on playing all the same!” He plays all his tunes out to the end. Down goes the blanket. Jack almost drops the pennies in his haste to be in time. The man stumps away down the road, and Jack loiters up the long path to the house, dreamy with the droning music, and flattered to the soul by the man’s thanks and the way he took off his hat when he said good-day. Nobody need try to make Jack believe that an organ-grinder can ever be a nuisance.

The road gate, the garden gate, and the gate at the foot of the path were the only gates that ever made any pretense to paint. The others were of the color that wind and weather freely bestow upon a good piece of old wood that has never been planed.

Jack became acquainted with the farm gates one by one, as his knowledge of the fields progressed. At first, for his short legs, it was a long journey to the barn. Here there was a gate which he often climbed upon but never opened; for within its protection the deep growl of the old bull was often heard, or his reddish-black head, lowering eye, and hunched shoulders were seen emerging from the low, dark passage to the sheds into the sunny cattle-yard. Even though nothing were in sight more awful than a clucking hen, that doorway, always agape and always dark as night, was a bad spot for a small boy to pass, with the gate of retreat closed behind him and the gate of escape into the comfortable, safe barnyard not yet open.

The left-hand gate, on the upper side of the barn, was the children’s favorite of all the gates. The barn was built against a hill, and the roof on the upper side came down nearly to the ground. The children used to go through the left-hand gate when, with one impulse, they decided, “Let’s go and slide on the roof!” This was their summer coasting. Soles of shoes were soon so polished that the sliders were obliged to climb up the roof on hands and knees. It was not good for stockings, and in those days there were no “knee-protectors;” mothers’ darning was the only invention for keeping young knees inside of middle-aged stockings that were expected to “last out” the summer.

It was a blissful pastime, to swarm up the roof and lie, with one’s chin over the ridge-pole, gazing down from that thrilling height upon the familiar objects in the peaceful barnyard. Then to turn round carefully and get into position for the glorious, downward rush over the gray, slippery shingles! It could not have been any better for the shingles than for the shoes and stockings; but no one interfered. Perhaps grandfather remembered a time when he, too, used to slide on roofs, and scour the soles of his shoes and polish the knees of his stockings.

The upper gate had another, more lasting attraction; it opened into the lane that went up past the barn into the orchards--the lovely, side-hill orchards. Grandfather’s farm was a side-hill farm altogether, facing the river, with its back to the sunset. If you sat down comfortably, adjusting yourself to the slope of the ground, the afternoon shadows stretched far before you; you saw the low blue mountains across the river, and the sails of sloops tacking against the breeze. One orchard led to another, through gaps in the stone fences, and the shadow of one tree met the shadow of its neighbor, across those long, sun-pierced aisles. The trees bent this way and that, and shifted their limbs under the autumn’s burden of fruit. The children never thought of eating a whole apple, but bit one and threw it away for another that looked more tempting, and so on till their palates were torpid with tasting. Then they were swung up on top of the cold slippery loads and jolted down the lane to that big upper door that opened into the loft where the apple bins were. Here the wagon stopped with a heavy creak. Some one picked up a child and swung it in at the big door; some one else caught it and placed it safely on its feet at one side; and then the men began a race,--the one in the wagon bent upon filling a basket with apples and hoisting it in at the door, faster than the man inside could carry it to the bin and empty it and return for the next.

These bins held the cider apples. The apples for market were brought down in barrels from the orchards, and then the wagon load of apples and children went through still another gate that led to another short lane under more apple-trees, to the fruit-house, where, in the cool, dim cellar that smelled of all deliciousness, the fruit was sorted and boxed or barreled for market. And in the late afternoon, or after supper, if the children were old enough to stay up so late, they were allowed to ride on the loads of fruit to the steamboat landing.

It is needless to say that this gate, which led to the fruit cellar, was one Jack very early learned to open. In fact, it was so in the habit of being opened that it had never acquired the trick of obstinacy, and gave way at the least pull.

When Jack was rather bigger, he was allowed to cross the road with his cousin, a boy of his own age, and open the gate into Uncle Townsend’s meadow. This piece of land had been many years in his grandfather’s possession but it was still called by the name of its earlier owner. Names have such a persistent habit of sticking in those long-settled communities where there is always some one who remembers when staid old horses were colts and gray-haired men were boys, and when the land your father was born on was part of his grandfather’s farm on the ridge.

A brook, which was also the waste-way from the mill, ran across Uncle Townsend’s meadow. Sometimes it overflowed into the grass and made wet places, and in these spots the grass was of a darker color, and certain wild flowers were finer than anywhere else; also weeds, among others the purple, rank “skunk’s cabbage,” which the children admired, without wishing to gather.

Water-cresses clung to the brookside; in the damp places the largest, whitest bloodroot grew; under the brush along the fences and by the rocks grew the blue-eyed hepatica, coral-red columbine, and anemones, both pure white and those rare beauties with a pale pink flush. Dog-tooth violets, wild geraniums, Solomon’s seal, Jack-in-the-pulpit, came in due season, and ferns of every pattern of leaf and scroll. Later, when the wet places were dry, came the tall fire-lilies and brown-eyed Rudbeckias, “ox-eyed daisies” the children called them, together with all the delicate, flowering grass-heads and stately bulrushes and patches of pink and white clover,--and all over the meadow there was a sleepy sound of bees, and shadows with soft edges lost in deep waves of grass.

Of course the brook did not stop at the meadow. It went on gurgling over the stones, dark under the willows; but there were no more gates. The brook left the home fields and took its own way across everybody’s land to the river. That was a long walk, which Jack took only when he was much older.

Another journey, which he grew up to by degrees, was that one to the upper barn. How many times over did he repeat his instructions before he was allowed to set out: “Go up the hill, past the mill, until you come to the first turn to the left. Turn up that way and follow the lane straight on”--but this was a figure of speech, for no one could go straight on who followed that lane--“till you come to the three gates. Be sure to take the left-hand one of the three. Then you are all right. That gate opens into the lane that goes past the upper barn.”

Near the upper barn were three sugar-maples--the only ones on the place that yielded sap; and in one of the neighboring fields there was a very great walnut-tree, second in size only to the old chestnut-tree in the burying-ground which was a hundred and fifty years old and bigger round the body than three children clasping hands could span.

Those up-lying fields were rather far away for daily rambles. Jack knew them less and so cared less for them than for the home acres, which were as familiar to him as the rooms of grandfather’s house.

But when grandfather’s children were children, the spring lambs wintered at the upper barn; and beauteous creatures they were by the following spring, with broad foreheads and curly forelocks and clear hazel eyes and small mouths just made for nibbling from the hand. Often, of a keen April morning, when the thawed places in the lane were covered with clinking ice, the children used to trudge at their father’s side to see the lambs get their breakfast of turnips, chopped in the dark cold hay-scented barn, while the hungry creatures bleated outside and crowded against the door.

Half the poetry of the farm life went into the care of the sheep and the anxieties connected with them. They were a flock of Cotswolds, carefully bred from imported stock. Their heavy fleeces made them the most helpless of creatures when driven hard or worried by the dogs, and every neighbor’s dog was a possible enemy.

On moonlight nights in spring, when watch-dogs are restless, and vagabond dogs are keen for mischief, the spirit of the chase would get abroad. The bad characters would lead on the dogs of uncertain principles, and now and then one of unspotted reputation, and the evil work would begin. When the household was asleep, a knock would be heard upon the window, and the voice of one hoarse with running would give the alarm:--

“The dogs are after the sheep!”

The big brother would get down his shot-gun, and the father would hunt for the ointments, the lantern, and the shears (for cutting the wool away from bleeding wounds), and together they hurried away--the avenger and the healer. Next day, more than one of the neighbors’ children came weeping, to identify a missing favorite. Sometimes the innocent suffered for being found in company with the guilty. There were hard feelings on both sides. Even the owners of dogs caught with the marks of guilt upon them disputed the justice of a life for a life.

There is one more gate, and then we come to the last one--the gate of the burying-ground.

A path went over the hill which divided grandfather’s house from that of his elder brother, whose descendants continued to live there after him. Uncle Edward’s children were somewhat older, and his grandchildren were younger than grandfather’s children; but though slightly mismatched as to ages the two households were in great accord. The path crossed the “line fence” by a little gate in the stone wall, and this was the gate of family visiting.

That way the mothers went of an afternoon with their sewing, or the last new magazine, or the last new baby; or in the morning to borrow a cupful of yeast, or to return the last loan of a bowlful of rice, or to gather ground-ivy (it grew in Uncle Edward’s yard, but not in grandfather’s) to make syrup for an old cough. That way came the groups, of a winter evening, in shawls and hoods, creaking over the snow with lantern-light and laughter to a reading circle, or to one of those family reunions which took place whenever some relative from a distance was visiting in the neighborhood. Along that path went those dear women in haste, to offer their help in sudden, sharp emergencies; and with slower steps again when all was over, they went to sit with those in grief, or to consult about the last services for the dead.

That was the way the young people took on their walks in summer--the stalwart country boys and their pretty city cousins in fresh muslins, with light, high voices, pitched to the roar of the street. That way went the nutting parties in the fall and the skating parties in winter. All the boys and girls of both houses grew up opening and shutting that gate on one errand or another, from the little white-headed lad with the mail, to the soldier cousin coming across to say good-by.

Between the two neighboring homes was the family burying-ground: all this pleasant intercourse went on with the silent cognizance and sympathy, as it were, of the forefathers who trod the path no more. The burying-ground was by far the best spot for a resting-place on either of the farms,--in a hollow of the hills, with a stone fence all round, draped as if to deaden sounds with heavy festoons of woodbine. Above the gray granite and white marble tombstones, rose the locust-trees, tall and still. The beds of myrtle, underneath, were matted into a continuous carpet of thick, shining leaves which caught the sunlight at broad noon with a peculiar pale glister like moonlight. The chestnut-tree stood a little apart, with one great arm outstretched as if calling attention, or asking for silence. Yet no child ever hushed its laughter as it passed the little gate with the gray pickets, overhung by a climbing rose, which opened into the burying-ground; and when, in the autumn, the old chestnut-tree dropped its nuts, the children never hesitated to go in that way and gather them because of the solemn neighborhood. They had grown up in the presence of these memorials of the beloved dead. But no one ever opened that gate without at least a momentary thoughtfulness. No one ever slammed it, in anger or in haste. And so it became a dumb teacher of reverence--a daily reminder to be quiet, to be gentle, for the sake of those at rest on the other side of the wall.

THE GARRET AT GRANDFATHER’S

The rooms at grandfather’s house had been used so long, they were almost human themselves. Each room had a look of its own, when you opened the door, as expressive as a speaking countenance.

“Come in, children dear!” the sunny sitting-room always seemed to say.

“Sit still and don’t talk too much, and don’t handle the things on the tables,” said the large, gleaming, dim-lighted parlors.

“Dear me, what weather this is!” grumbled the poky back entry where the overshoes and waterproofs and wood-boxes were kept.

“There’s a piece--of cake--in the cupboard for you,” quietly ticked the dining-room clock, its large face looking at no one in particular.

But of all the rooms in that house, upstairs or down, not one had the strangeness, the mysterious nod and beck and whisper, of the murky old garret.

“Hark, what was that?” it would seem to creak; and then there was silence. “Hush! I’ll tell you a story,” it sometimes answered.

Some of its stories were true, but I should not like to vouch for all of them.

What a number of queer things it kept hidden away under the eaves that spread wide, a broad-winged cloak of shadows! What a strange eye it had, its one half-moon window peering at you from the high, peaked forehead of the gable.

The garret door was at the far end of the long upper hall; from it the stairs (and how they did creak!) led up directly out of the cheerful daylight into that uncarpeted wilderness where it was always twilight.

It was the younger children’s business to trot on errands, and they were not consulted as to where or when they should go. Grown people seem to forget how early it gets dark up garret in winter, and how far away the house noises sound with all the doors shut between.

When the children were sent up garret for nuts,--for Sunday dessert with mince pie and apples, or to pass around with cider in the evening,--they were careful to leave the stair door open behind them; but there was little comfort in that, for all the people were two flights down and busy with their own concerns.

Downstairs in the bright western chambers nobody thought of its being late, but up garret, under the eaves, it was already night. Thick ice incrusted the half-moon window, curtaining its cold ray that sadly touched an object here and there, and deepened the neighboring gloom.

The autumn nut harvest was spread first upon sheets on the garret floor to dry, and then it was garnered in the big, green bathtub which had stood, since the children could remember, over against the chimney, to the right of the gable window. This tub was for size and weight the father of all bathtubs. It was used for almost anything but the purpose for which it was intended.

In summer, when it was empty, the children played “shipwreck” in it; it was their life-boat, and they were cast away on the high seas. Some rowed for dear life, with umbrellas and walking-sticks, and some made believe to cry and call for help,--for that was their idea of the behavior of a shipwrecked company; and some tramped on the bulging tin bottom of the tub, which yielded and sprang back with a loud thump, like the clank of oars. It was very exciting.

In winter it was the granary. It held bushels and bushels of nuts, and its smooth, out-sloping sides defeated the clever little mice who were always raiding and rummaging among the garret stores.

Well, it seemed a long distance to the timid little errand girl, from the stairs, across the garret floor to that bathtub. “Noiseless as fear in a wide wilderness,” she stepped. Then, what a shock it was, when the first loud handfuls of nuts bumped upon the bottom of the pail! The nuts were pointed and cold as lumps of ice; they hurt the small hands that shoveled them up in haste, and a great many handfuls it took to fill the pail.

Hanging from the beams that divided the main garret from the eaves, dangled a perfectly useless row of old garments that seemed to be there for no purpose but to look dreadful. How they might have appeared in a different light cannot be said; there seemed to be nothing wrong with them when the women took them down at house-cleaning time and shook and beat them about; they were as empty as sacks, every one. But in that dim, furtive light, seen by over-shoulder glimpses they had the semblance of dismal malefactors suffering the penalty of their crimes. Some were hooded and seemed to hang their heads upon their sunken breasts; all were high-shouldered wretches with dangling arms and a shapeless, dreary suggestiveness worse than human. The most objectionable one of the lot was a long, dark weather-cloak, worn “about the twenties,” as old people say. It was of the fashion of that “long red cloak, well brushed and neat,” which we read of in John Gilpin’s famous ride.

But the great-grandfather’s cloak was of a dark green color, and not well brushed. It had a high, majestic velvet collar, hooked with a heavy steel clasp and chain; but for all its respectable and kindly associations, it looked, hanging from the garret rafters, just as much a gallows-bird as any of its ruffian company.