"You still see the fun look out of his eyes at times," said the Doctor, "and his laugh has a quality that refreshes and refines for us again the meaning of the good old word 'hearty'; but mirthfulness is no longer so marked a characteristic in him as it once was."
When we came in sight of the little plantation prophetically known as "The Grove," I could not help calling the Doctor's attention to it. He took a much more flattering interest in it than you did, I must tell you. He turned his steps towards it immediately, commended the spaces which made full allowance for growth, and, seating himself on one of the benches,—according to you, such premature constructions,—gave me a dissertation on soils, very entertaining and very profitable. When he had finished, I would gladly have carried him back to the subject from which the sight of my trees had diverted us, but I felt that this required a little skill: I had known him repelled by a question of too incautious directness from a topic on which he would have been eloquent, if he had led the way to it himself. However, as soon as we were once walking forward on our former path again, his thoughts, too, returned to the old track. Our intimacy had ripened fast on the common ground of sympathy we had found in the grove. He was more expansive than before, and revealed a latent gentleness I had begun to suspect in him. He went on to tell of Harry's infancy and childhood, and to relate instances of his early daring, self-reliance, and generosity of heart,—smiling, indeed, a little at himself as he did so, and casting now and then towards me a glance of inquiry, almost of apology, like one who is conscious of being indiscreet, but who cannot resolve to refrain. I could not but observe that the anecdotes related with most pleasure illustrated that very side of Harry's character which gave the Doctor uneasiness.
Karl and Fritz were employed that day in clearing a piece of ground overgrown with brushwood. We had found them at their work in our morning walk, and Harry had promised to come back and take a hand in it. It was an animated scene that the Doctor and I came upon. Before we reached it, we heard a pleasant clamor of voices and laughter. My German boys are faithful workers, and generally cheerful ones; but now they carried on their task with an ardor and an hilarity which doubled their strength, and gave them an alertness which I had thought was not of their race.
"Will you let me finish my stint?" Harry cried, as soon as we were near enough to answer him. The merry light in his eye and the gleeful earnestness of his manner brought up to me the little boy of whom the Doctor had been talking to me. He was taking the lead. He could not have been practised in the work; but the strong sweep of his arm, his sure strokes, did not speak the novice. He directed and encouraged his assistants in familiar and idiomatic German, which made me feel that my carefully composed sentences must be somewhat stilted to their native ears.
Old Hans found himself there, too, drawn by I don't know what attraction,—for a share in this work did not belong to his day's plan. He was not taking a principal part in it; he had a hatchet in his hand and chopped a little now and then in a careless and fitful way, but he was chiefly occupied in observing the amateur, whose movements he followed with an admiration a little shaded by incredulity. He stood like the rustic spectator of an exhibition of legerdemain, his applause restrained by the displeasure of feeling himself the subject of an illusion.
But over the boys Harry's ascendancy was already complete: not only did their bush-scythes keep time with his, but their voices, when they answered him, and even when they spoke to each other, were more gently modulated,—their very laugh had caught something of the refinement of his. When afterwards in my talks with him he unfolded, among his plans for the future, a favorite one of leading a colony to some yet unsettled region, I felt, remembering this scene, that he was the man for it.
Hans was won over before we left him. When we arrived, he had searched my face with a look which, at the same time that it asked my opinion of the stranger, gave me to understand that he himself was not one to be dazzled by outward show. As we were going, his eye caught mine again: he gave me a nod of satisfaction, which said that he had at last made up his mind, and that it was one with my own. Perhaps he had been aided in coming to a decision by the care with which Harry delivered up to him the tools he had been using, and by the frank pleasure with which the volunteer woodman received the words of approbation which the veteran could not withhold.
I cannot write you the whole of last Monday's journal to-night. I came in late. The weather is fine again, and I took a long day in the field to make up for lost time.