The well in the wood

by Bert Leston Taylor

Before you learn about this strange flower, Little One, I must tell you something of the small person who found it, and of the wood in which it grew.

“Buddie” was her every-day name. It is short and easy to say, especially if one is in a hurry, as Buddie’s mother always was. On Sundays her name was Ethel Elvira, which quite became a dress with a great deal of starch, a sash with a great deal of rustle and new shoes with a great deal of squeak.

Her home was a log house in the wild Northland, just where the pine-trees came down to peep into the mirror of a great lake. It was a lonely shore and not at all the kind that you, Little One, would like, for there was no sandy beach to dig in. Here and there were short stretches of gravel, but mostly it was black rock and deep water, which the sun never succeeded in warming. As far as one could see up and down the lake there was no other house, and the only blur on the wide sweep of dark blue water was the tattered sail of a restless Indian or the trailing smoke of a distant steamer.

In all the country round about there was only one road, and this kept so close to the lake—for fear, very likely, it would get lost—that there was just room between it and the water for the log house and a small back yard for the chickens. Across the road was a cleared space, sloping up over a little hill, in which grew potatoes, turnips and other vegetables that could stand a cold climate; for Buddie’s home was so far north that real winter lasted six months, and sometimes longer. There wasn’t any spring to speak of—without complaining—and nobody could tell when summer ended and autumn began.

Buddie had two brothers younger than herself. One was a wee tot who slept in a hammock near the kitchen stove, where the mother could keep the pot a-boiling and the cradle a-swinging at the same time; the other usually spent his time “helping father” to improve the road, which was in a sad way, or to hunt for the cows, which sometimes went deep into the wood to escape the tormenting flies.

As there was no other little girl to play with, Buddie had to amuse herself as best she could. One way was to turn the pages of a big, fine book of animal stories, a Christmas gift from a city friend of the family; and when all the pictures had been looked at for the hundredth time, she would call Colonel and ramble along the edge of the wood, in the hope of seeing some of the animals pictured in her book.

She never went more than a very little way into the wood.

“For if you do,” her mother would say, “the bears will eat you up.” So it was that the wood came to have a great fascination for her, as it would for you or me, Little One, if we could not go into it. A great many of us always wish to do what we are told not to do, which is very wrong, of course, and discourages the wise and patient people who write books on Ethics.

It was a wonderful wood, not at all like the wood in your favorite fairy tale. You can hardly realize, Little One, how far away it stretched—hundreds and hundreds of miles—away to the ice and snow of the far, far North. There were no roads, as in your fairy-tale wood, and no paths except a few old trails which had not been used for years, and over which the wild grasses and shrubs ran again. From the shore road you could see into it only a little way, because there were so many trees that had branches close to the ground, and such a tangle of old dead trees and thickly growing young ones. During the day, when the sunlight crept in through every crack, it was quite cheerful among the pines and firs and birches, and a great deal seemed to be going on there; but when night came on it grew dark and still, and the only speck of light for miles and miles came from the lamp in the log house window.