VIII
During the winter the Poor Boy made two excursions, lasting for a number of days, southward through his valley and beyond. It was supposed by Martha, wild with anxiety, and by Miss Joy, but little less so, that he went alone. As a matter of fact he had companions; Yardsley, the forester and surveyor; Wangog, the Huron chief, taciturn in talk, but a great woodsman; and Stephen Bell, a young man recently come to live in the village and a great favorite with the Poor Boy.
It had developed that there were enough people wrongfully accused of some crime or other in the world to settle the Poor Boy's lands from the big lake all the way to the salt sea. And the main object of his long excursions was to locate upon deep water, navigable for great ships, a site, not for a village, but for a city.
Already his first village had suburbs, and here and there, dotted about among the foot-hills, were villas belonging to a wealthier class of people: Bradleys, Godfreys, Warrens, Warings, etc., families of position and breeding, among whom was a constant round of little dinners and dances to which the Poor Boy dearly loved to be invited.
During the winter, the Poor Boy made two excursions southward through his valley and beyond.
Government by a commission of three was an established and successful fact. Though it must be owned that as the man member and the woman member could never agree about anything, all reins of policy were gathered into the hands of the child.
"A child leads us," was often in the mouths of the village elders, and often anxiety expressed as to what would happen when the child grew up. But that he would grow up was not likely, since he was the very image of what the Poor Boy himself had been at the same age—a charming, straightforward, most honorable boy, touched by the fairy godmother of justice, music, and fancy.