“And what a great bear has climbed on to my ladder,” retorted the girl.
He came down from the ladder and began to tell her his plans.
“Bessie, I mean this shall be yet one of the best farms in the state. On that hill I will have corn and clover; there shall be an orchard in the hollow next to it, with peach-trees on the south side of the little rise; and I will plant cranberries in the swamp beyond. In ten years from now, if a man should leave here to-day, he wouldn't know the place.”
Bessie smiled at the magician who was to work such wonders—never [pg 214] doubting but he would—then glanced about at the scene of his exploits. Sombre, blue-green pines brooded over the hill that was one day to be pink with clover, or rustling with corn; oaks, elms, maples, birches, and a great tangle of undergrowth, with rocks and moss, cumbered the ground where peaches were to ripen their dusky cheeks, when Jack should bid them grow, and large, green, and red-streaked and yellow apples were to drop through the still, bright, autumn air; and she knew that the future cranberry-swamp now stood thick and dark with beautiful arborvitæ trees, whose high-piled, flaky boughs, tapering to a point far up in the sunshine, kept cool and dim the little pools of water below, and the black mould in which their strong roots stretched out and interwove. But Jack could do anything when he set out, and her faith in him was so great that she could shut her eyes now and see the open swamp matted over with cranberry-vines, and hear the corn-stalks clash their green swords in the fretting breeze, and the muffled bump of the ripe apple as it fell on the grass.
After a while, Bessie started to go, but came back again.
“I forgot,” she said, and gave her lover a book that had been hidden under the boughs in her apron. “A book-pedlar stopped at our house last night, and he left this. Uncle Dennis doesn't want it, and I do not. Perhaps you can make some sense out of it.”
It was a second-hand copy of Comstock's Natural Philosophy, for schools, and was scribbled through and through by the student who had used it, years before.
Jack took the book.
“And that reminds me of your white-faced boarder,” he said, with a slight laugh. “Is he up yet?”
“Oh! he gets up earlier than any of us,” she answered lightly. “He doesn't act cityfied at all. And you know, Jack, the reason why he is white is because he has been sick. Good-bye! Aunt Norah will want her broom before she gets it.”