There was no woodland scene and there were no ferns.
Here I reach the curious part of my story.
When I was a country lad of some seventeen years in Kentucky, one August afternoon I was on my way home from a tramp of several miles. My course lay through patches of woods—last scant vestiges of the primeval forest—and through fields garnered of summer grain or green with the crops of coming autumn. Now and then I climbed a fence and crossed an old woods-pasture where stock grazed.
The August sky was clear and the sun beat down with terrific heat. I had been walking for hours and parching thirst came upon me.
This led me to remember how once these rich uplands had been the vast rolling forest that stretched from far-off eastern mountains to far-off western rivers, and how under its shade, out of the rock, everywhere bubbled crystal springs. A land of swift forest streams diamond bright, drinking places of the bold game.
The sun beat down on me in the treeless open field. My feet struck into a path. It, too, became a reminder: it had once been a trail of the wild animals of that verdurous wilderness. I followed its windings—a sort of gully—down a long, gentle slope. The windings had no meaning now: the path could better have been straight; it was devious because the feet that first marked it off had threaded their way crookedly hither and thither past the thick-set trees.
I reached the spring—a dry spot under the hot sun; no tree overshadowing it, no vegetation around it, not a blade of grass; only dust in which were footprints of the stock which could not break the habit of coming to it but quenched their thirst elsewhere. The bulged front of some limestone rock showed where the ancient mouth of the spring had been. Enough moisture still trickled forth to wet a few clods. Hovering over these, rising and sinking, a little quivering jet of gold, a flock of butterflies. The grey stalk of a single dead weed projected across the choked orifice of the fountain and one long, brown grasshopper—spirit of summer dryness—had crawled out to the edge and sat motionless.
A few yards away a young sycamore had sprung up from some wind-carried seed. Its grey-green leaves threw a thin scarred shadow on the dry grass and I went over and lay down under it to rest—my eyes fixed on the forest ruin.
Years followed with their changes. I being in New York with my heart set on building whatever share I could of American literature upon Kentucky foundations, I at work on a novel, remembered that hot August afternoon, the dry spring, and in imagination restored the scene as it had been in the Kentucky of the pioneers.
I now await with eagerness all further felicities that may originate in a woodland scene that did not exist. What else will grow for me out of ferns that never grew?