The Wishing-Stone Stories

by Thornton W. Burgess

It was funny that Tommy never could pass that gray stone without sitting down on it for a few minutes. It seemed as if he just couldn’t, that was all. It had been a favorite seat ever since he was big enough to drive the cows to pasture and go after them at night. It was just far enough from home for him to think that he needed a rest when he reached it. You know a growing boy needs to rest often, except when he is playing. He used to take all his troubles there to think them over. The queer part of it is he left a great many of them there, though he didn’t seem to know it. If Tommy ever could have seen in one pile all the troubles he had left at that old gray stone, I am afraid that he would have called it the trouble-stone instead of the wishing-stone.

It was only lately that he had begun to call it the wishing-stone. Several times when he had been sitting on it, he had wished foolish wishes and they had come true. At least, it seemed as if they had come true. They had come as true as he ever wanted them to. He was thinking something of this kind now as he stood idly kicking at the old stone.

Presently he stopped kicking at it, and, from force of habit, sat down on it. It was a bright, sunshiny day, one of those warm days that sometimes happen right in the middle of winter, as if the weather-man had somehow got mixed and slipped a spring day into the wrong place in the calendar.

From where he sat, Tommy could look over to the Green Forest, which was green now only where the pine-trees and the hemlock-trees and the spruce-trees grew. All the rest was bare and brown, save that the ground was white with snow. He could look across the white meadow-land to the Old Pasture, where in places the brush was so thick that, in summer, he sometimes had to hunt to find the cows. Now, even from this distance, he could trace the windings of the cow-paths, each a ribbon of spotless white. It puzzled him at first. He scowled at them.

“When the whole thing is covered with snow, it ought to be harder to see those paths, but instead of that it is easier,” he muttered. “It isn’t reasonable!” He scowled harder than ever, but the scowl wasn’t an unpleasant one. You know there is a difference in scowls. Some are black and heavy, like ugly thunder-heads, and from them flashes of anger are likely to dart any minute, just as the lightning darts out from the thunder-heads. Others are like the big fleecy clouds that hide the sun for a minute or two, and make it seem all the brighter by their passing.

There are scowls of anger and scowls of perplexity. It was a scowl of the latter kind that wrinkled Tommy’s forehead now. He was trying to understand something that seemed to him quite beyond common sense.

“It isn’t reasonable!” he repeated. “I ought not to be able to see ’em at all. But I do. They stick out like——”

No one will ever know just what they stuck out like, for Tommy never finished that sentence. The scowl cleared and his freckled face fairly beamed. He had made a discovery all by himself, and he felt all the joy of a discoverer. Perhaps you will think it wasn’t much, but it was really important, so far as it concerned Tommy, because it proved that Tommy was learning to use his eyes and to understand what he saw. He had reasoned the thing out, and when anybody does that, it is always important.

“Why, how simple!” exclaimed Tommy. “Of course I can see those old paths! It would be funny if I couldn’t. The bushes break through the snow on all sides, but where the paths are, there is nothing to break through, and so they are perfectly smooth and stand right out. Queer I never noticed that before. Hello! what’s that?”

His sharp eyes had caught sight of a little spot of red up in the Old Pasture. It was moving, and, as he watched it, it gradually took shape. It was Reddy Fox, trotting along one of those little white paths. Apparently, Reddy was going to keep an engagement somewhere, for he trotted along quite as if he were bound for some particular place and had no time to waste.