“Just see there, Boy Cousin! See the blue sky with the white birch bough running across it and the little spray of red maple leaves! It’s our flag, our own Red, White, and Blue. But let’s go and see the stone house. We can come back here this afternoon.”
So down the road they went. On the left was a little hill where lay some great-great-grandfathers, men who had forced their way into the new country and cut out for themselves homes in the wilderness. Their graves were marked by field stones, just as they had been left in the early times. At one or two of them an initial was rudely cut into the stone. Ella wondered a little whether she would have liked these great-great-grandfathers or her French ones better. “I had some French great-great-grandfathers, too,” said Boy Cousin. “What a pity that we couldn’t all have lived at the same time!”
On the right of the road was a row of tamarack trees, and over the wall a field through which the river ran in graceful curves, and a mass of great rocks that looked as if hurled together by an earthquake, but made the nicest places possible for little “cubby houses” and ovens for baking mud cakes.
Through the bars the children went, over a little bridge, across the wide-spreading meadow, and up a hill to a rocky pasture where the gray horse was roaming about.
“The horse and the rocks are the very same color,” said Ella. “I don’t see how you know which of them to put the bridle on when you go to catch him.”
“That’s easy,” replied Boy Cousin. “I just look the rocks over, and put the bridle on the one that shakes its tail.”
There was one rock, larger than the others, and of all the rocks that the children had seen, this was the only one that split into layers. Wide slabs of this rock lay all around, and of these slabs they had made, the summer before, a little cottage. It stood up against the great rock, with a slab of granite for each wall and one for the roof. By patient hammering they had contrived to break out a place for a doorway and a window. It was so well built that it had stood bravely through all the frosts and storms of a mountain winter.
“It looks just exactly as it did,” Ella said delightedly. “I was afraid it would fall down. I wonder that the ram did not knock it down.”
Boy Cousin was silent. He was never inclined to brag of his own exploits. Ella went on: “Grandpa told me last night. He said that the ram kept trying to butt you, and that you hadn’t anything to fight it with except a little stick; but that you climbed up on this rock and managed somehow to keep it off till your father came from the next field. He said you were a plucky boy, or you would have been killed.”
“Who wouldn’t be plucky rather than killed?” demanded the hero of the story. “There’s no end of checkerberries over there. Let’s make a birch-bark basket and pick some.”