We soon find the tree whence he gathered his fruit. It is a noble hickory, with here and there a brown leaf clinging to its boughs. A stone or two brings the globes that hold the nuts to the earth. They have commenced cracking, and with a little exertion we uncover the snow-white balls. We are now all determined to rob the tree. It has no business to be displaying its round wealth so temptingly. And, beside, it will, if let alone, most probably entice boys from the little black school-house out yonder to "play truant." So it is unanimously voted that Benning, who is light and active, should climb the tree. Up he goes, like one of those little striped woodpeckers that are so often seen in the woods tapping up the trees, and immediately his hands and feet make the branches dance, whilst the green globes drop like great hail-stones on the earth. We then commence stripping the nuts from their covers, and soon the base of the tree is covered with them. We then stow the ivories away in our bags, and start for new havoc.
We come now to the brush-fence. It is a perfect chevau-de-frize. It looks at us with a sort of defying, bristling air, as if it said as Wilson, the horse-jockey, says when some one endeavors to hoodwink him in a bargain, "You can't come it!"
We wont try here, but a little lower down there is a gap made by John Huff's cow, that uses her horns so adroitly in the attack of a fence, no matter how difficult, that I verily believe she could pick a lock. We pass through the kindly breach and skirt the fence for some little distance to regain the path. The fence on this side is densely plumed with blackberry vines. What a revel I held there two months ago. The fruit hung around in rich masses of ebony, each little atom composing the cone having a glittering spot upon it like a tiny eye. How the black beauties melted on my tongue in their dead-ripe richness. One bush in particular was heavy with the clusters. After despoiling the edges I opened the heart, and there, hidden snugly away, as if for the wood-fairies, were quantities of the sable clusters, larger and more splendid than any I had seen. I immediately made my way into the defences of that fortress. There was a merciless sacking there, reader, allow me to tell you. But that is neither "here nor there" on the present occasion.
How beautifully the soft, tender dark light slumbers on objects where the great roof of the forest will allow it. There is an edge of deep golden lace gleaming upon that mound of moss, and here, the light, breaking through the overhanging beech, has so mottled the tawny surface of the leaves beneath as to make it appear as if a leopard-skin had been dropped there.
B-o-o-m, b-o-o-m, boom-boom—whi-r-r-r-r-r—there sounds the drum of the partridge. We'll rouse his speckled lordship probably below, causing him to give his low, quick thunder-clap so as to send the heart on a leaping visit to the throat.
We now descend the ridge upon which we have been for some time, to a glade at the foot. The sweet haze belonging to the season is shimmering over it. It is a broad space surrounded on all sides by the forest. The first settler in this part of the country had "located" himself here, and this was his little clearing. His hut stood on an eminence in one corner. He lived there a number of years. He was a reserved, unsocial man, making the forest his only haunt, and his rifle his only companion. He was at last found dead in his cabin. Alone and unattended he had died, keeping to the last aloof from human society. The hut was next occupied by a singular couple—an old man and his idiot son. The father was of a fierce, savage temper, but seemed very fond, although capriciously so, of his child. Sometimes he would treat him with the greatest tenderness, then again, at some wayward action of the idiot, he would burst upon him with an awful explosion of passion. The old man had evidently been a reckless desperado in other days, and many in the village suspected strongly that he had once been a pirate. He was addicted to drinking, and now and then, when bitten by the adder, would talk strangely. He would commence narrating some wonderful hurricane he had experienced on the Spanish Main, and would launch out upon the number of times he had headed boarding parties, and once, in a state of great intoxication at the village tavern, he rambled off into a story about his having made an old man walk the plank. He would, however, check himself on all these occasions before he went far. He became involved in a fight one time with a great lounging fellow about the village, whose propensity to bully was the only salient point in his character. They clinched—the old man was thrown, and the bystanders had just time to pull the bully away, to prevent a long keen knife in the grasp of Murdock (for such was the old man's name) from being plunged into his side.
Suddenly the idiot-boy disappeared. The passers-by had frequently seen him (for he was an industrious lad) working in the little patch belonging to the cabin, but from a certain time he was seen no more, and the old man lived alone in his cabin. A change, too, gradually grew over him. He became silent and deeply melancholy, and his countenance settled into an expression of stern, rigid sorrow. His eye was awful. Wild and red, it seemed as if you could look through it into a brain on fire.
At last he commenced rubbing his right hand with his left. There he would fasten his gaze, and chafe with the most determined energy. He would frequently stop and hold the hand to his eye for a moment, and then recommence his strange work. To the inquiries of the village people concerning his son, he would give no answer. He would roll upon the inquirer for an instant his fierce, mad eye, and then prosecute his mysterious chafing more rigorously than ever.
Things continued so for about a fortnight after the disappearance of the idiot, when one dark night the village was alarmed by the appearance of flames from the clearing. Hurrying to the spot, they were just in time to see the blazing roof of the hut fall in. The next morning disclosed, amidst the smouldering ashes, a few charred bones. Murdock was not again seen or heard of from that night.
The glade is now quiet and lonely as if human passions had never been unloosed there in the terrific crime of parricide—the consequent remorse merging into madness, and a fiery retributory death. Upon the grassy mound, which the frost has not yet blighted, a beautiful white rabbit has just glided. The lovely creature darts onward, then crouches—now lays his long ears flat upon his shoulders, and now points them forward in the most knowing and cunning manner. He plays there in his white, pure beauty, as if in purposed contrast to the blood-stained and guilty wretch who expired on the same spot in his flaming torture. But the little shape now points his long, rose-tinted ears in our direction, and then he does not disappear as much as melt from our sight like the vanishing of breath from polished steel. We then enter fully into the glade. One of the trees at the border is a magnificent chestnut. I remember it in June, with its rich green leaves hung over with short, braided cords of pale gold. These braided blossoms have yielded fruit most plenteously. How thickly the chestnuts, with their autumn-colored coats and gray caps, are scattered around the tree, whilst the large yellow burrs on the branches, gaping wide open, are displaying their soft velvet inner lining in which the embedded nuts have ripened, and which in their maturity they have deserted.