'Hannah!'
It was a foolish repetition of the name. Of course there were other Hannahs in the world. The old servant of that name, who had told the man stories in his boyhood, had been dead more years than the child could number.
'Yes,—don't you know Hannah? She'll come and call me in presently, and then you'll see her. Hannah says they—the trees—have grown up with the family' (he assumed a queer importance, evidently in unconscious mimicry of the one who had repeated the tradition to him), 'and that with them the house will stand or fall. Do you think the roots really reach so far?'
There was an underlying uneasiness in the tone, which it was impossible altogether to disguise.
As the other expressed his inability to volunteer an opinion on this point, the boy went on, seeing that his confidences were treated with due respect:
'I dug up one myself once—I wished I hadn't afterwards—to make myself a Christmas tree like I'd read about. I just had to hang some old things I had on it. It was only a tiny fir, small enough to go in a flower-pot; but that night the house shook, and the windows rattled as if all the trees in the forest were trying to get in. I heard them tapping their boughs ever so angrily against the pane. As soon as it was light, I went out and planted the Christmas tree again. I hadn't meant to keep it out of the ground long: they might have known that.'
'Have you no playfellows here?'
The boy gave a comprehensive glance around. 'There are the trees; they are good fellows. I wouldn't part with one of them. It's fine to hear them all clap their hands when we are all jolly together. There are nests in them, too, and squirrels. We see a lot of one another.'
This statement was not difficult to believe: the Holland overalls bore evident traces of fellowship with mossy trunks.
The boy did most of the talking. He had more to tell of the founder of the family whose portrait hung in the parlor, and of how, when he—the child—grew up, he rather thought of writing books, as that same ancestor had done, and making the name great and famous again. He had not decided what kind of books he should write yet. Was it very hard to find words to rhyme, if one tried poetry? He was at no pains to hide such fancies and ambitions, of which his kind are generally too sensitive or too ashamed to speak to their elders, and which are as a rule forgotten as soon as outgrown.