“I’ve nothing but small shot in my gun: if you’ll let me alone, I’ll let you alone;” and he passed on.
The brook led him to a rocky ridge, through a chasm, in which the brook flung itself over bowlders large and small, old logs, and over and under great tree roots, that ran and twisted in among them from bank to bank.
It was the white foam of this waterfall Charlie had caught glimpses of through the foliage.
“There’s a brook for you,” said he; “it’s another kind from our brook: that’s a quiet, cosy little brook; but this is a tearing fellow. What a chance for a dam in that gap! ’twould cost next to nothing to build it, and there’s water enough to carry a saw mill, spring and fall.”
Following the course of the brook, which from the point of the fall to the mouth was very devious, he at length came to a place where it almost returned upon itself, forming a little tongue, with a beautifully rounded extremity, entirely bare of underbrush, and covered with a thick mat of grass. Near the end stood a magnificent elm, the only one Charlie had as yet noticed. Its trunk was begirt with that network of foliage formed by the interlacing of many small twigs and green leaves, which often, in its natural state, impart such singular beauty to that noble tree. Among these meshes the wild ivy crept and twined, half imbedded in the cork-like bark. Far above the roots, two enormous branches diverged from the trunk, and nearly at right angles with it; after running some distance in that direction, curved upward, separating at a great height, the one into three, the other into five branches, and there again subdividing, together with those of the main trunk and others springing from the surface of the side branches, terminated in a vast tracery of pendent foliage, covering the whole of the little promontory with their shadow, and almost touching the brook that washed its shores. As Charlie burst from the gloom of the thick forest upon this sweet spot and this lordly tree, among whose broad masses of foliage the rays of the declining sun seemed to love to linger, he paused in mute admiration. At length he approached the great tree, and standing on tiptoe, managed to barely reach the extremity of a twig, and drew down the limb: he then stepped back and looked upon the tree, and noted every feature of the landscape.
“Was there ever so beautiful a spot as this!” he said at length. “I must have a piece of this land. I never can like any other place, except Elm Island, after this. I wonder who it belongs to. Here’s everything—timber, water, good land, I know by the growth, and O, how beautiful! Fish in the brook too: there’s no fish in our brook, only the smelts and frost-fish that come from the salt water.”
Heated and weary, he sat down between the spur roots of the great tree, and looked up between the boughs, watching the play of the sunlight quivering among the leaves, and espied two hangbirds’ (orioles) nests pendent from the branches.
“You’ve been stealing the tow from my grafts, I guess, you rogues,” noticing the material of which the nests were made.
Returning to the shore, he found the tide was out, and had left a considerable extent of smooth, gravelly beach. He walked down to the water’s edge; the clams were spouting all around him.
“A bold shore and plenty of clams: it’s a great thing to have clams; we’ve often found it so on the island. If I had an axe to cut logs and build a big fire, I’d sleep here to-night; but I haven’t,and that she bear, or some wolf; might pay his respects to me in the night. I’ll tell Uncle Isaac about that bear, and we’ll have her, cubs and all.”