| Swinging in the lane; swinging in the lane; |
| Sweetest girl I ever met was swinging in the lane. |
The great, bending branches spread a canopy befitting a Druid temple, and the new little leaves, like crumpled bronze velvet, brushed my face as I held fast to the ropes, all a-tremble with the spirit of adventure and a little fear that the earth was so very far away, and was tossed up till I could peep into the nest out of which my pet blue jay had tumbled a week before. One of his brothers sat, a disconsolate fluff of faded blue feathers, on the edge of the nest, and the parent birds squalled noisy protest at the sturdy, red-stockinged legs invading their domestic privacy.
The oaks and the swing and the old gentleman were the first milestones on my way to Grown-Up Land. When my round fat arm had no longer to reach straight up to clasp my pudgy fingers around the thumb of my friend; when after many trials I caught the ropes and lifted myself without help to the wide board swing-seat; then I was truly 'big,' and trotted off to demand that a new mark should take the place of the one that had lately shown my height on the smooth gray trunk of my favorite tree. Smooth, for those wonderful oaks, centuries old, and each many feet in girth, had been repeatedly stripped of their bark as high as a man could reach; and now, as if tired of renewing the ever stolen coat, contented themselves with a thin, scarlike covering. Since their sapling days, perhaps, slender, conical tepees of buffalo skins had nestled in their shade, and number-less brown babies had swung 'Rock-a-bye baby in a tree-top' from their limbs.
There was a broad hearth of stones between the spreading roots of one where buffalo steaks had been broiled, and where other children had roasted the plump ripe acorns as I was fond of doing.
The buffalo robes for the tepees and deerskins for the gayly wrought moccasins had been tanned with the bark stripped from those very trees under which I played and swung. In the little grove behind my beloved trees, and bordered by the tiny creek where I waded and fished with a bent pin for small flat sunfish as bright as living sunbeams, were bare poles still standing in a circle, lashed together at their tops with strips of bark or thongs of raw-hide.
There were wild cherries in the grove, good in blossom and better in fruit, puckery-sweet wild plums, and a great black-walnut tree dear to myself and the squirrels; and here the spirit of adventure thrilled me again, for my fancy saw dusky faces behind every bush, and the feathery cherry blossoms were always nodding eagle feathers on the head of the warrior just waiting to seize me.
A good deal of this was due to my old friend who had just come from the East, a far-away, mysterious Somewhere to me, and who, I am inclined to think, secretly shared my dread of these brown people in whose home we were interlopers. But some of it came from the tales to which I listened after I was tucked away in my trundle-bed on winter nights, and the men gathered around the fire to talk of Indian raids and hunting and trapping adventures.
Not a few of my old gentlemen at this time were gray-bearded scouts and hunters, with great caps of fur and long rifles that seemed to tower above my head as far as the oaks. Children were rare novelties to those men of the plains, and I was passed from shoulder to shoulder, delighted with tales of bear and buffalo, and fingering with awed hands the beaded shot-pouches and belts of embroidered buckskin, but feeling all the while almost as far above earth as when I swung over the blue jay's nest. Then we moved away, and my next old gentleman was the very antithesis of the first. Small and thin and morose, with a bitterness that almost hid the sadness in his face. A misanthrope, a miser, an atheist, said his neighbors; but, in truth, only a man over whom hung the shadow of a tragedy that had darkened his life. Sometimes for days his mind 'traveled a crooked road,' as he said, and then he would wander alone in the hills, or shut himself up with his books; and no smoke came out of the chimney, and no answer was given to curious people who knocked at the door. Most children feared him, but I did not; that and my love of books made the bond between us. He lent me quaint old histories and philosophies, full of big words that sounded very fine as he rolled them off in a sonorous voice. I learned to know Swedenborg from Kant, and Kant from Comte, and was in a fair way to become a philosopher myself when again we moved—so far that we both knew the parting was final.
With fingers still pudgy I crocheted him a pair of marvelous green 'wristers' as a farewell gift, and he brought me a thick red volume, De Foe's History of the Devil, with pictures that made my brown braids rise up visibly every time I looked at them, and a single German silver teaspoon, which he said was to form the nucleus of my wedding silver.
Years later some book thief of abnormal tastes robbed me of the treasured De Foe, but the spoon still reposes in solitary state, untroubled by additions, and most unlikely ever to serve the end for which my old friend designed it.