"No, father."
"And the lake is frozen over?"
"No, father."
"Then," said Hume, with a sigh of great content, "we must have a log-cabin, lest our bones lie bleaching on the shore."
Next morning he went into the woods with Pierre and two men hastily summoned from the village, and there they began to make axe-music, the requiem of the trees. The boy sat by, dreaming as he sometimes did for hours before starting up to throw himself into the active delights of swimming, leaping, or rowing a boat. Next day, also, they kept on cutting into the heart of the forest. One dryad after another was despoiled of her shelter; one after another, the green tents of the bird and the wind were folded to make that sacred tabernacle—a home. Sometimes Francis chopped a little with his hatchet, not to be left out of the play, and then sat by again, smoothing the bruised fern-forests, or whistling back the squirrels who freely chattered out their opinions on invasion. Then came other days just as mild winds were fanning the forest into gold, when the logs went groaning through the woods, after slow-stepping horses, to be piled into symmetry, tightened with plaster, and capped by a roof. This, windowed, swept and garnished, with a central fireplace wherein two fires could flame and roar, was the log-cabin. This was home. The hired builders had protested against its primitive form; they sighed for a snug frame house, French roof and bay windows. "'Ware the cold!" was their daily croak.
"We'll live in fur and toughen ourselves," said Ernest Hume. And turning to his boy that night, when they sat together by their own fire, he asked,—
"Shall we fashion our muscles into steel, our skin into armor? Shall we make our eyes strong enough to face the sun by day, and pure enough to meet the chilly stars at night? Shall we have Nature for our only love? Tell me, sir!"
And Francis, who hung upon his father's voice, even when the words were beyond him, answered, "Yes, father, please!" and went on feeding birch strips to the fire, where they turned from vellum to mysterious missals blazoned by an unseen hand.
The idyl continued unbroken for twelve years. Yet it was not wholly idyllic, for, even with money multiplying for them out in the world, there were hard personal conditions against which they had to fight. Ernest Hume delighted in the fierceness of the winter wind, the cold resistance of the snow; cut off, as he honestly felt himself to be, from spiritual growth, he had great joy in strengthening his physical being until it waxed into insolent might. Francis, too, took so happily to the stern yet lovely phases of their life that his father never thought of possible wrong to him in so shaping his early years. As for Ernest Hume, he had bound himself the more irrevocably to right living by renouncing artificial bonds. He had removed his son from the world, and he had thereby taken upon himself the necessity of becoming a better world. Therefore he did not allow himself in any sense to rust out. He did a colossal amount of mental burnishing; and, a gentleman by nature, he adopted a daily purity of speech and courtesy of manner which were less like civilized life than the efflorescence of chivalry at its best. He had chosen for himself a part; by his will, a Round Table sprang up in the woods, though two knights only were to hold counsel there.
The conclusion of the story—so far as a story is ever concluded—must be found in the words of Francis Hume. Before he was twenty, his strength began stirring within him, and he awoke, not to any definite discontent, but to that fever of unrest which has no name. Possibly a lad of different temperament might not have kept housed so long; but he was apparently dreamy, reflective, in love with simple pleasures, and, though a splendid young animal, inspired and subdued by a thrilling quality of soul. And he woke up. How he awoke may be learned only from his letters.