"And I always take too much," responded Jeff-Jack.
I think we have spoken of John's slumbers being dreamless. A child can afford to sleep without dreaming, he has plenty of dreams without sleeping. No need to tell what days, weeks, months, of sunlit, forest-shaded, bird-serenaded, wide-awake dreaming passed over this one's wind-tossed locks between the ages of eight and fifteen.
Small wonder that he dreamed. Much of the stuff that fables and fairy tales are made of was the actual furnishment of his visible world—unbroken leagues of lofty timber that had never heard the ring of an axe; sylvan labyrinths where the buck and doe were only half afraid; copses alive with small game; rare openings where the squatter's wooden ploughshare lay forgotten; dark chasms scintillant with the treasures of the chemist, if not of the lapidary; outlooks that opened upon great seas of billowing forest, whence blue mountains peered up, sank and rose again like ocean monsters at play; glens where the she-bear suckled her drowsing cubs to the plash of yeasty waterfalls that leapt and whimpered to be in human service, but wherein the otter played all day unscared; crags where the eagle nested; defiles that echoed the howl of wolves unhunted, though the very stones cried out their open secret of immeasurable wealth; narrow vales where the mountain cabin sent up its blue thread of smoke, and in its lonely patch strong weeds and emaciated corn and cotton pushed one another down among the big clods; and vast cliffs from whose bushy brows the armed moonshiner watched the bridle-path below.
These dreams of other children's story-books were John's realities. And these were books to him, as well, while Chesterfield went unread, and other things and conditions, not of nature and her seclusions, but vibrant with human energies and strifes, were making, unheeded of him, his world and his fate. A little boy's life does right to loiter. But if we loiter with him here, we are likely to find our eyes held ever by the one picture: John's gifted mother, in family group, book in her lap—husband's hand on her right shoulder—John leaning against her left side. Let us try leaving him for a time. And, indeed, we may do the same as to Jeff-Jack Ravenel.
As he had told Barbara he would, he made his residence in Suez.
A mess-mate, a graceless, gallant fellow, who at the war's end had fallen, dying, into his arms, had sent by him a last word of penitent love to his mother, an aged widow. She lived in Suez, and when Ravenel brought this message to her—from whom marriage had torn all her daughters and death her only son—she accepted his offer, based on a generous price, to take her son's room as her sole boarder and lodger. Thus, without further effort, he became the stay of her home and the heir of her simple affections.