A minute later the boy was in the arms of his father, who was striding back towards the path, while Rover ran yelping gleefully before and behind and on every side.
How short was the journey back to the house, compared with that which Dick had made from it in the afternoon! Almost before Dick had finished his explanation to his father, in somewhat incoherent speeches and a rather unsteady voice, they beheld the kitchen's open door, in which the mother stood waiting. She caught the boy in her arms, covered his face with kisses and tears, and declared he should never go out of her sight again.
"But I'll go some day, when I'm grown up," said little Dick, as he sat filling himself with supper a half-hour later. "I didn't know the road to Paris was so long."
And he didn't know his road to Paris should one day be taken with no thought of its leading him there, and how very roundabout that road should be.
CHAPTER II.
"OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY."
The next time Dick went far from home was when the hired man, John Campbell, took him past his grandfather's island, and thence on down the Susquehanna and into Sherman's Valley, whither Campbell was bent on a courting expedition. During his visit at the house of Campbell's friends, Dick attended the burning out of a snake-nest, an occasion that was participated in by settlers from all the country round. The nest was in a pile of rocks in some woods that a farmer intended to transform into a field for cultivation. Here rattlesnakes and copperheads throve and multiplied. Men with axes and sickles cleared a circle around the rock-pile, at some distance from it, and then set fire to the wood within. When the flame reached the snakes, for which there was no escape, their writhing was a novel sight. Dick, who at first enjoyed the spectacle as only a young boy can enjoy scenes of wholesale slaughter, at last came to being sorry for the victims, because they had no fair fighting chance. The loathsome odor that soon arose drove him away, so that he lost most of the rum-drinking and other jollification that followed the snake-burning.
Snakes, though he could pity those attacked with fire and at a disadvantage, were Dick's abomination. Their abundance was a chief reason why he dared not gratify his taste for roaming far from the house. As yet, when he came on one suddenly, he would act the woman,—that is to say, he would run in great fright, or sometimes stand still in greater, till help came or the snake fled of its own accord. It was several years before he had the courage, on hearing the shriek of some snake-affrighted harvesting woman in the fields, to vie with the men in running to her rescue. For a long time he envied the readiness with which his father, if confronted by a snake while reaping, would club it to death and then, sticking the point of the sickle through its head, hold it up for the other harvesters to see.
But there was a long season when the settlers need have no fear of rattlers and copperheads, nor of Indians, either; that was the winter. Dick was allowed to walk abroad a little more freely then, for the very reason that the cold was sure to bring him soon back again to the vast fireplace. There were other reasons than those of weather, why that fireplace was a magnet to Dick. There, in the time of little work, when the world outside was white and wind-swept, Dick's father would sit and read to the household, or tell of his fights and dangers on both sides of the ocean. There, when the cider went round, was great flow of joke and story and song. For Dick's father, though a man of strict standards of behavior, and outwardly stanch to his adopted sect, which in his neighborhood stood for decency and education, was a man of lively wit and of jocular turn of mind. Dick's mother, though of a severely Presbyterian family, and humbly religious, was of too kindly and cheerful a nature to be soured by piety, and too rich with the health of this pleasant earth to be constantly thinking of another world. She had sensibility and emotion, with the common sense and strength to control them. Her younger sister partook of the prevalent lightness of heart. Campbell, the hired man, whose raw stolidity was tempered by a certain taciturn jocoseness, contributed to the household mirth by the stupid wonder with which he listened to the others, the queer comments he sometimes made, and the snores with which he often punctuated the general conversation when he slumbered in his seat in the fireplace. Dick's place was opposite Campbell's, and when he sat there in the evening he could look up and see the stars through the top of the chimney. Rover's spot was at Dick's feet, whence in his dreams he would echo the snores of Campbell.