Good Stories for Great Holidays / Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the Children's Own Reading

by Frances Jenkins Olcott

And because it had no pools in it deep enough for trout, and no trees on its borders but gray nut pines; because, try as it might, it could never get across the mesa to the town, the stream had fully made up its mind to run away.

“Pray, what good will that do you?” said the pines. “If you get to the town, they will turn you into an irrigating ditch, and set you to watering crops.”

“As to that,” said the stream, “if I once get started I will not stop at the town.”

Then it would fret between its banks until the spangled frills of the mimulus were all tattered with its spray. Often at the end of the summer it was worn quite thin and small with running, and not able to do more than reach the meadow.

“But some day,” it whispered to the stones, “I shall run quite away.”

If the stream had been inclined for it, there was no lack of good company on its own borders. Birds nested in the willows, rabbits came to drink; one summer a bobcat made its lair up the bank opposite the brown birches, and often the deer fed in the meadow.

In the spring of one year two old men came up into the Canyon of Pinon Pines. They had been miners and partners together for many years. They had grown rich and grown poor, and had seen many hard places and strange times. It was a day when the creek ran clear and the south wind smelled of the earth. Wild bees began to whine among the willows, and the meadow bloomed over with poppy-breasted larks.

Then said one of the old men: “Here is good meadow and water enough; let us build a house and grow trees. We are too old to dig in the mines.”

“Let us set about it,” said the other; for that is the way with two who have been a long time together,—what one thinks of, the other is for doing.

So they brought their possessions, and they built a house by the water border and planted trees. One of the men was all for an orchard but the other preferred vegetables. So they did each what he liked, and were never so happy as when walking in the garden in the cool of the day, touching the growing things as they walked, and praising each other's work.