"Well, my boy; what are you dreaming of tonight?" she asked, as she seated herself in her accustomed place on the arm of his chair and placed her arm gently on his shoulder.
"O, I've just been planning a bit, mother," he said with a smile. "Sometimes when I sit here by this old fire I forget myself. I travel to the strangest lands and think the strangest thoughts. Still, they all seem so very real to me that when I try not to think of them a peculiar restlessness comes over me. I can hardly wait for summer and the great big out-of-doors. Did you ever think, mother, what life would be if we didn't have the birds and the bees and the flowers? Are people in the cities happy and contented without them? I've often wondered. I suppose some day I'll be going to the city to live, as all the other boys have done; but when I think of it it makes me sad. I don't believe I'd ever be happy in the city, mother, unless—"
He paused long enough to stir up the fire and put on another log.
"Unless what, Willis?" his mother inquired.
"Unless—" he hesitated as if thinking. "I could go West to where father was."
His mother listened as he went on. "The schoolmaster was telling us today about the wonderful Rocky Mountains. He was there last summer on his vacation, you know. We were studying about Pike's Peak and the Garden of the Gods, so he told us all about his trip there. He went from Colorado Springs to somewhere away up in the mountains to a great gold camp. He told us of the queer little shanties the people live in, and of the great piles of waste ore outside of each mine. He went through one mine, the Independence, I think he called it, or the Portland—I don't remember which now; but he said the machinery used in hoisting the ore was wonderful. It all set me to thinking of father—I've been thinking of him all day. Mother, it's mighty hard for a fellow like me not to have any father, only just a dead one."
He arose a second time to replenish the fire, but remained standing, facing his mother. He was too deeply interested in his own thoughts just then to notice the tears that were slowly stealing down his mother's face, and the light was too dim for him to see her sad, care-worn expression. She was not old, but fate had not been kind to her. She was a slender little woman, with a heavy mass of what had once been brown hair, but it was now streaked with gray. Her eyes were large and brown, and the intermingled expression of love and sadness made her face one of tender beauty, lighted as it was by the rosy tints from the open fire. As the boy talked on in his manly way she suddenly became aware of a change in him. She noticed the well-built and symmetrically developed body, the broad shoulders, the short, stocky neck, and the head covered with brown ringlets. She could not see the face, but she knew only too well of whom it reminded her, for of late she had often found herself saying, "Just like the father—just like the father."
It was during such winter evenings as this that she had come to know her son best, as she sat on the arm of his chair and listened with tactful sympathy to his stories of the big black bass that kept house in the pool at the end of the lake, or of the downy woodpecker's nest in the old hickory, or, perhaps, of the big hoot owl that perched on the granary warm nights to watch for mice. It was with a certain feeling of sadness, as well as of pride, that she watched him grow older, lose his boyhood ways, and become more and more of a man—a man just like his father!
"I get so lonely for some one to teach me things, and go with me into the big woods, and help me skin my rats in season," he was saying, "and to teach me to use tools and to understand the books and—"
"Yes, my son," she replied. "But haven't you me? Won't I do to read with you and help you find new wild flowers and gather strange caterpillars in the spring?"