When Life Was Young: At the Old Farm in Maine

by C. A. Stephens

"Oh, hear him!" cried Halse. "Ad will be out giving lectures on geology next!"

"No," said Addison, laughing, "I don't want to give lectures. I don't know how the rocks got there, but they got there somehow, for there they are. Two of them, as Nell says, are almost as large as a house; and they all stand around, irregularly, enclosing a sort of little space inside them, as large as—how big is it, Doad?"

"Oh, I should think that it was as large as our sitting-room," she replied.

"It is bigger than that," said Ellen. "It is as big as the sitting-room and parlor together."

"Perhaps it is," assented Theodora. "But it isn't like rooms at all; it is an odd place and there are nooks like little side rooms running back between where the sides of the great rocks approach each other. It is a real pleasant place, sort of gigantic and rustic. I don't wonder that Thomas and Kate like to go there."

"None of these big rocks quite touch together," continued Addison, "but Tom has built up between them with stones, all around, except one narrow place which he calls the fort gate. He has built up all the open places, six or seven feet high, so that it is really like a fort: and he has made a stone fireplace against one of the rocks inside, with a little chimney of flat stones running up the side of the rock, so that he can have a fire there without being plagued by the smoke."

"And he's got a woodpile in there," said Ellen, "and seats to sit on, round his fireplace. It is a cozy place, I tell you; the wind doesn't strike you at all in there; and the knoll is quite a good deal higher than the ground about it. You climb up a little path and turn the corner of one big rock, and then go in between that one and another, for fifteen or twenty feet, till you come to the open place inside, where the fireplace is. Tom and Kate gave a little party there last fall. Tom was a number of days building the fireplace and the wall and getting ready. We all went there one evening and Kate and I played there one afternoon, a week after that. But I guess they haven't been there at all this spring and summer. I haven't heard them say anything about it for a long time, till this afternoon. 'Tell the boys and Doad to come over here this evening,' Tom said, as I was coming away. 'I'm going to roast corn down at my fort to-night.'"

"Let's all go over after it gets dark and storm his fort!" exclaimed Halse. "We can take sods and pitch them over the rocks into his fort after he gets in there and is roasting corn!"

"I don't think that would be a very polite way of accepting his invitation," said Theodora.

"That would be contrary to all the laws of war, to storm a neighboring nation's fort, before war was declared!" said Addison, laughing. "That would be a sad piece of international treachery."