The Brook
I
I OFTEN tried to trace the Brook (it had no other name) to its source; but I always failed. Perhaps, after all, I really did not care to solve that alluring mystery of my childhood, to find in the primeval forest the first threadlike trickle from under a moss-covered stone deep in perpetual twilight, or slender pencil of silver reaching down from a fern-clad bank. I shall never trace it now except in fancy; for Time and Circumstance, those twin fates that preside over the destinies of men, have placed a continent between me and that about which all my boyhood life revolved.
The Brook had its origin somewhere in the forest-covered slope of the South Mountain; hurried breathlessly from one granite basin to the next until it reached the Valley; wound capriciously for a couple of miles through alder and willow land; and at last joined a river with mud banks as sleek as the sides of some huge, overfed beast. The river carried the water of the Brook on past wide marshes and out through a gap in a mountain wall to the sea, to my child’s fancy a fearsome place of shipwrecks, spouting whales, and violent storms, the echo of which sometimes thrilled me on still winter nights as I lay awake in bed, listening to the faint, resurgent thunder of the surf.
My first attempt to follow the Brook into the forest was on a spring day when trout bit well and the alder catkins were powdered like golden bees. Standing guard on the first shelf of granite rock above the lowland, over which water fell in a greenish veil, was a hackmatack (Micmac for tamarack), whose roots clutched octopuslike at the shallow soil. Its sparse evergreen foliage, touched with the spring, rose above me like thin smoke. In the bottom of the pool below were skeletons of last year’s dead leaves, through which mica from disintegrated granite tantalized me with its suggestion of gold.
Bait, in the form of angleworms, I kept in the left-hand pocket of my jacket. I always started with a generous supply, for a good many of them crawled out. My fishing pole was a peeled willow rod forked at the end, to keep the line in place; the sinker was made of lead I had melted down from bullets flattened against iron targets on the rifle range of the militia. The hook had a real eye in the end, not one of those things with a stamped head that slipped through the most ingenious knot I could tie in the line every time I hooked a big one. I always carried an extra hook caught in the front of my jacket; and when I needed it I simply jerked it out, tearing small holes in the cloth until it looked motheaten — an appearance which greatly puzzled my mother.
I got down on my hands and knees and peered into the pool for signs of fish. I baited my hook with a blackheaded worm fat as an alderman, and cautiously lowered it over the side of the bank. Is there any joy for the small boy quite equal to the first tug on a fishing pole? Kingdoms may rise and fall, but the eternal boy will still be thrilled by a ‘bite,’ just as he was ten thousand years ago when he used a bone hook and a strip of bark for a line.
The trout I landed lacked the plumpness and bright coloring of those I caught in the sunny pools farther downstream. It wriggled from the hook and fell among dead leaves, which stuck to its sides until it wore a rustic coat of brown. I always carried my fish on a forked hazel branch (it did not split easily at the crotch), slipping one prong through a gill slit; so this weedy specimen was added to a half-dozen others, already dry and wrinkled from exposure to the wind and sun.
As I moved into the forest, the stillness awed me a little. This brook seemed puny, subdued, compared with the bustling fellow who hurried over the stones among the alders and willows. I wound my line about my fishing pole, and, stepping into the cold water, skirted a ledge of granite. In an open space stood a great hemlock with a dark stain halfway up its side, about which bees were clustering. I had chanced upon a bee tree; but I was not the first to discover it, for cut deep into the bark were grooves left by the sharp claws of a bear that had climbed it in search of honey.
A few rods farther on, I came upon a mark in the mud that sent shivers down my spine. I knew it at once for a bear track, and was ready to run, when I spied something white under a spruce bush. Curiosity overcame fear, and I pulled out from under the bush the fresh pelt of a sheep, neatly rolled into a ball. My father had complained about bears killing our sheep, and here was proof of it. The partly eaten body I found not far away. So bruin skinned his mutton before he ate it, and rolled up the pelt!
The sound of breaking twigs made me leap like a frightened rabbit, and the next moment I was off in headlong flight. I slipped on a moss-covered log and fell, my fish flying in one direction and my pole in another. In a few moments I was just a wild thing fleeing in sheer animal panic. To my child’s fancy there was a bear lurking behind every bush, and the one who had recently dined on mutton was in hot pursuit.
II
After this unfortunate adventure, dreams of exploring the Brook to its origin died down for a time; but they gradually revived, usually in autumn when the lure of the flaming mountain side and beechnuts pattering down from frosted husks was upon me. I had heard vaguely of the wonders of the wilderness that lay beyond: great antlered moose that splashed about among the lily pads along the margins of lakes set deep in the forest; beavers that built dams across streams and slapped the sealing mud down with their tails (had n’t old Bushby Dow heard the slapping all one night when he was lost in the woods?); loons that dived so fast that the shot from a gun never reached them before they were under the water, and that laughed like crazy squaws — whatever that was like.
Slowly and with many heartbreaking mistakes I had made myself a pair of snowshoes. I had bent the bows out of green ash cut from the precious second growth in a clearing at the top of the mountain. From this grove the Indians used to pilfer wood for baskets and axe handles, and then sell them to my father, who grumbled at paying for his own property, but bought them just the same. The laces I had patiently cut with my jackknife from an old buffalo robe once used by my grandfather in his sleigh.
I am not sure how long I had been toying with the idea, but one night when the snow sparkled as if it were alive I came to the great decision. Next day I would travel on my snowshoes to the source of the Brook, and build a log cabin there. I would chop down the necessary trees with my new axe, the first one I had ever owned. For days I had tried to put an edge on it ‘sharp enough to shave with,’for that was what every logger boasted he could do with his axe. Having no beard to try the axe on, I pulled hairs out of my dog’s back; but I never could cut one in two.
Following the Brook in winter when the leaves were off and the logs and stones buried deep under the snow was a new experience. I had no fear of bears now, for I knew they were fast asleep in their dens, sucking their paws. Bushby Dow assured me that he had once caught one in the very act.
The greater part of the Brook was now arched over with snow; but I could hear it talking to itself as if it were pleased with its warm blanket. Here and there the snow had fallen in, and I looked down at the water slipping along over the pebbles just as it did in the summer time. At each little fall the twigs of the near-by bushes were encased in ice, which clinked as the water swayed the submerged lower branches. In the trees high overhead blue jays sang shrill pæans, woodpeckers with scarlet crests pounded on dead trunks with a sound that was startling in the brooding stillness.
In sheer delight, I sat down on a log to watch a couple of chickadees swinging under a branch, their headdress suggesting an old lady’s lace cap. Over there at the foot of that granite wall I would build my log house: I was too tired from trudging through the deep snow to follow the Brook any farther. Perhaps the snow would bury it so deep that I should have to crawl out of a hole in the roof, just as one of my forbears was obliged to do when the first Puritan settlers came to the Valley.
I had taken off my jacket and woolen mittens, and was about to spit on my hands man-fashion for a good grip on the axe handle, when the swish of a branch froze me in my tracks. Climbing cautiously to the top of the cliff, I saw before me the thing I had so often longed to see. I knew him at once for an old bull moose; but he was twice as large as I had pictured him. He seemed all shoulders and head as he gathered the maple twigs under his long, wobbly upper lip, drew the branch down to him, and then let it swing back after he had clipped off the twigs with his chisel-like teeth. All about, the snow was trodden down and the lovely striped moosewood eaten off. I forgot all about my cabin, and watched the old fellow as he shambled about his yard until the blue shadows on the snow under the trees warned me that night was not far off. I had no desire to harm him; indeed, I felt a sudden liking for the old fellow, and would have ventured out into the yard had he not clashed his horns against a branch and frightened me into a stealthy retreat.
III
But the Brook as it ran through the alders and willows was the joy of my young life. The upper part was on old Alfred Langley’s land, and I always looked cautiously about before climbing over the line fence, for fear he might catch me and do some dreadful thing to me, I scarcely knew what. Once while picking checkerberries in his pasture I had looked up to find him bending over me, a sardonic grin on his lined and leathery face that made me cry out in my sleep that night.
On down the Brook past a cranberry bog, where in late fall I gathered frosted fruit, was the bridge over which every winter Alfred hauled his firewood with a pair of bony red-and-white oxen whose flight down the mountain side from the sled load of logs to which they were attached was to my child’s mind a breath-taking performance. Just above the bridge was the watering place to which the gaunt old tyrant drove his cattle every night and morning through the long winter. Sometimes, in a fit of rage, he would mount his old sorrel mare and run the cows to and from this spot. Once a frightened cow slipped and broke a leg, and I hid behind some spruce bushes to watch him skin her. At every stroke of the knife he made queer doglike sounds in his throat that made me doubly afraid of him.
That bright, frosty night I crept to the brow of the hill and watched the foxes that gathered about the carcass, yapping and snapping at each other until an old fellow who stood guard on a cliff gave a sharp bark, at which they all scattered. By daylight I hunted up their tracks to see if they covered them by dragging their tails in the snow, as Bushby assured me they did; but the tracks were clear enough.
Alfred set several traps near the carcass, but never caught a fox. He used to bury the traps in hayseed and wear woolen mittens when he pressed down the springs; but all he caught was an occasional crow — that is, until one day a great white-headed bird got fast and flew away over the mountain with a trap clamped to its leg. Served him right, we boys all agreed.
Not far below the bridge was the line fence between old Alfred’s farm and our own. On our side alders grew rank, and there I always went for my first whistle, pounding the bark loose with the handle of my jackknife, and spitting on the naked wood when I wished to slip the bark back to see if it would blow.
In this swamp I found cocoons attached to alder twigs (odd that I never found them anywhere else), and one cold January day I gathered a handful of them and took them home. I placed them on the mantel over the fireplace, and in due time three beautiful moths with an eye on each wing appeared, flew about the room for a day, and then perished of cold during the night. I still remember the sudden hurt as I came upon one lying still on its side under a potted geranium.
Once in the swamp I found a wild duck’s nest. It was cleverly hidden under the edge of a spruce bush between two tussocks, and the mother bird, as she whirred up past my face, frightened me so badly that I dropped my string of fish. Every day after my discovery I hid in some bushes and watched her. She seemed the very embodiment of waiting stillness. I could scarcely think of her heart beating or of her breathing. One morning when I peered through the bushes the nest was empty, and a dozen tiny ducklings in coats of orange down were paddling about a still water where the brook widened out. As I watched, a sleek black head appeared above the surface, disappeared, and then a frightened duckling fluttered for a moment before it was pulled under. So far as I could see, the mother never missed it.
Under our own bridge lived a wily old trout that for years I tried to catch. The sides of the bridge were made of heavy logs, and under the bottom log on the north side he lived winter and summer, through floods, and through droughts that brought the water perilously low. He had a white scar on the left side of his body, and a hook in his upper lip at an angle that always reminded me of old Joe Sanders smoking his pipe. Oh, the hours I have fished for him, lying on my belly peering down through a wide crack between the poles that covered the bridge! When the hook was lowered he would sail out and with cool nonchalance inspect it, even nosing it about a little; but in the end, with a leisurely flip of his tail, he would retreat to his castle. He was never obliged to make forays among the aqueous serfs and villeins in the neighboring territory; every gust of wind, every shower and freshet, brought new supplies to his door.
Below the bridge the Brook widened into a shallow pool paved with manycolored stones and patches of gleaming gravel. Across this the cows passed morning and night on their way to and from pasture. Each one stepped slowly and cautiously, cocking her tail a little in the deepest part.
Here a school of ’shivvins,’ with scaly sides that gleamed like tiny jewels, fooled all day in the sunshine. They were never more than six inches long, not very good to eat, and I caught a mess of them only when the trout would not bite. The ‘bladder’ in them was in two parts, tied together like a couple of sausages. Of what earthly use it could be was quite beyond my child’s comprehension. I used to press it with my thumb nail to hear it pop.
Over the shivvins played a host of ‘skippers,’ long-legged, spider-like fellows with a tiny pontoon on each foot. How I used to envy them, for they could play in the water all day with dry feet. One morning our Sunday-school teacher told us about Christ walking on the water, and I exclaimed, ‘Just like a skipper!’ My pat simile shocked the good man, and brought me a severe reprimand.
IV
Not far below this shallow pool the South Branch joined the Brook where a witch-hazel always puzzled me by blooming so late in the fall that flurries of snow sometimes mingled with the yellow-dusted catkins. This small stream had its origin in a swamp where cows, tempted by the green grass of late summer, were sometimes bogged. Once, while looking for pitcher plants, I came upon ‘Old Baldy’ sunk so deep in the mire that only her face and horns showed above the black mud. Before I could gather enough wits to run for help, she gave a fearful roar, struggled so violently that the surrounding bog shook, and then vanished. I am not sure whether, when I told my story to the family, I was considered a hero or a villain.
And here, in the gloom of squat, wide-branching hackmatacks, glossy spruce partridges sat all day like feckless things. Bushby Dow showed me how to slip up behind and snare them with a wire on the end of a pole; but, try as I might, I was never successful, for even the stupidest of them would duck its head at the crucial moment.
In the middle of this swamp was a ‘ boiling spring ’ from whose mysterious depths mica was always rising, and falling away on all sides like a great flower in the perpetual act of unfolding. Its water was supposed to have valuable medicinal qualities, and my father conceived the idea of piping it into the house. There were no iron pipes in the Valley in those days, but some ingenious fellow made an auger with an extremely long shank, cut secondgrowth firs into sixteen-foot lengths, and bored a hole from end to end. Occasionally the auger would run out the side and spoil a length; but for the most part it followed the heart with uncanny accuracy. Every six inches the tool had to be drawn out to dispose of the chips, an operation attended with much grunting and a deal of profanity.
The task of putting in this water system was nothing less than herculean, for the spring was nearly a mile away. What those pipes cost in sweat and labor would to-day buy iron pipe for a small town. In the end, water, soft and pure, flowed in a continual stream from a pipe over the sink, and on out to the drinking trough in the barnyard. From this it passed to another trough (each was cut out of a pine log) at the side of the road, where many a thirsty horse was reined in to drink. My father maintained this trough at his own expense, and the public came to take it for granted, grumbling if by any chance it went dry.
Where the pipe line crossed the Brook the depression was so great that it was impossible to cover the wood with earth, so it was heavily weighted down with stones against spring freshets. At this low point a plug was inserted, the removal of which drained out the collected sediment that, if undisturbed, grew into a fibrous rope yards long, at length filling the pipe and cutting off the supply of water. Occasionally I would remove the plug, just to see the water shoot into the air higher than my head. But I always paid for my fun; for I was thoroughly drenched before I got the plug back in place.
A few rods below the pipe line the Brook turned to the north round the end of a snub-nosed hill. At the tip of this rocky ridge grew a large gray birch, squat, wide-branched, with a drunken lurch to the east. Into its bark generations of boys, passing it while trouting, had carved their initials, some in the crudest of characters, others with artistic flourishes that revealed the embryo artist. It was a code of freemasonry, in its essence older than the pyramids of Egypt, more vital, more time-resisting than all the creeds.
Below this tree the soil deepened, patches of water cress graced the leisurely flowing stream, and the trout holes under the banks were more cavernous. Here the fish were larger, lazier, not so easily tempted to grab at an angleworm writhing on a hook as were the fish farther upstream.
By the age of eleven I had gathered considerable piscatorial lore. I had learned to tread as softly as ever Caliban would wish, always removing my white straw hat when approaching a hole, and never letting my shadow fall across the water. I don’t remember how I discovered that trout bite well on cloudy days, and best of all in a downpour. Whenever it rained, I would look longingly out of the school window near the bench from which my brown legs dangled, and think of the trout I might be catching in the Brook. One night when the rain was humming a soft tune on the roof, and the enticing smell of opening buds was in the air, I came to the sudden resolve to play hooky (did some small boy, on fishing bent, coin the word ?) the next day and go trouting.
I wore no jacket that eventful morning — just my cotton shirt and trousers that always bagged at the knees. No shoes, either. Just the eternal boy by the eternal brook. I still hear the plot-plot of the raindrops as they plunged headlong into the water. Trout, of a size I had never dreamed lived under those banks, seized my hook every time I lowered it through the rain-pitted surface. On clear days I had often watched an old fellow lurking under a shelving rock, but he had always ignored even the fattest worm; to-day my first glimpse of him was when his head broke through the bubbling water. The rain added to the lustre of his speckled sides, and when he flounced clear of the hook I pounced upon him when he was already back in the Brook.
In half an hour my forked hazel branch was so heavily loaded with spotted beauties that the weight of them tired my arm. And this is a ‘happy ending’ story, for my mother did not scold me when I came dripping into the kitchen and presented her with the fish. I was knighted, in fact (my insignia were dry clothes from a special stock in her own closet), like those old English freebooters who brought home to good Queen Bess treasure ships from the Spanish Main. For women were pragmatists long before William James discovered that convenient word. As for the teacher — but teachers have no place in a small boy’s philosophy; it is too ancient, deep rooted, to be disturbed by such a recent and superfluous thing.
V
The fence that terminated my fisherman’s paradise, stretching four rails high right across the Brook, was leprous with dried ‘frog spawn,’ lodged there by the spring freshets. Every small boy in the Valley who knew anything about ponds and brooks believed that this slimy, rope-like growth was deposited by frogs. And there is one form of belief in a boy’s heart that can never be shaken — that which he receives from another boy. For one boy’s loyalty to another is the most unshakable thing in human experience.
Beyond the fence two steep banks faced each other, and across the narrow space between someone had built a milldam. The mill itself had long vanished; but the high ridge of earth, cut through by the old flume, was still there, though softened in outline. In winter, swept clean of snow by gales from the marshes, it was bleak and forbidding, but in spring it was yellow with dandelions, in which bees held high carnival. The spot was sheltered from the chilly east winds of April, and there I would lie by the hour, digging my toes into the grass and conjuring up the mill as it might have been. For I never asked a soul its history; that would have spoiled my child’s game. I always pictured a large man with a Roman nose and a grizzled beard driving the dogs into the log to be sawn, and then riding the carriage until the board dropped away. I came to know his gait, the sound of his heavy footsteps, and even his voice when he talked to himself; but, oddly enough, I never gave him a name.
Beyond the dam was a boggy hayfield, where one had to jump from tussock to tussock. Here on warm June nights lightning bugs glowed softly in patches large as a dish pan, and occasionally a ball of whitish fire rose and drifted rapidly away when there seemed to be not a breath of air. One evening as I was crossing this swale a large ball passed close to my head, and the old German with the big stomach and bristling whiskers said, when he heard of it, that I was marked for death. I was badly frightened for a day or two; but life was far too fascinating to remember this gloomy prophecy for long.
Cutting squarely across the swale was the King’s Highway, at this point a granite-walled structure that seemed to my child’s mind the work of nothing less than giants. Looking back, I realize that the labor involved in gathering and placing those unhewn boulders by nothing more effective for power than oxen must have been a staggering task.
Along the top of either side the old Puritan fathers who built it had planted willows, now grown to formidable proportions, with their roots running snakelike down between the boulders. Under this mass of stone and earth, which to me seemed as indestructible as the globe itself, the fathers had built a tunnel to carry off the brook water. To venture into that dark passage toward the diminished square of light at the farther end was a first-rate adventure, carrying with it the abiding fear that the roof might cave in and trap me, leaving me buried alive like some colliers I had heard my father read about, who were entombed in a coal mine.
My favorite time for exploring this fearsome place was late August. Then the water was low, and the great pine logs, squared with broadaxe and adz, that formed both floor and ceiling were clearly visible under the shallow water that rippled over them. I would pause for a little, peer in for any lurking enemy, and then enter as cautiously as my remote skin-clad ancestors must have ventured into a newly discovered cave. The sudden coolness, and the air that drew briskly through from the marshes beyond, always brought a chill to my body, which only the soundness of a boy who virtually lived out of doors could resist. The sunlight, the clouds, the birds, suddenly seemed remote, unreal. Small eels were always squirming between the logs on their way upstream; but I never saw a trout in there. As the ceiling was too low to stand erect, water was always dripping down the back of my neck. Once I mistook the rumble of a carriage overhead for the collapse of the heavy timbers, and ran with all the speed I could muster in my cramped position, unwittingly plunging into the deep basin of water at the farther end, dug when the spring freshets boiled out of the tunnel.
VI
Below the highway was our calf pasture, in spring joyous with frogs, and in early summer yellow with buttercups. What handfuls of them I used to gather, and how vividly I remember the first cup I ventured to hold under a girl’s chin! But, alas, I do not remember her name, or even her face — only the vaguely disturbing chin with its soft curves.
The Brook at this spot slowed down and deepened into pools that reached well under willow-fringed banks. To see the bottom, I would lie on my stomach and shade my eyes with my straw hat. Here were no trout or shivvins; the water was not alive and clear enough for that; but over the brown sediment eels slowly serpentined, and on it eighteen-inch suckers lay in a torpor so deep that I could slip my hand under those in shallow water and toss them out on the bank. Here, too, mud turtles rested like fat old ladies in plaid shawls. Occasionally a muskrat moved rapidly across this still world, the fur sleeked down to his sides, the disturbed water that slipped back from the tip of his nose resembling a comet I had seen pictured in my geography. It was the borderland between brook and river, a bit sobering, with the mystery of the great marshes beyond.
How well I remember the last clear pool before the muddy tidewater began! Here, screened by a pile of boulders, an occasional crane stood dejectedly on one leg (I used to wonder if he had cut the other foot and it hurt), as if meditating upon his sins. With what awe I used to watch his slow and ponderous flapping as he blundered up at my approach!
From this pool on, the channel deepened rapidly. The muddy banks bristled with bulrushes, between which night-prowling muskrats left tracks on their way to and from the lily pads whose small bulbs they unearthed in the darkness. Occasionally a muskrat trap (‘box trap,’ we always called it) drifted in on the earth-brown tide — one whose loss some other boy deeply regretted, but which I gladly appropriated. If a stray skiff chanced along, I hid it behind a certain rock and paddled about at high tide, never venturing out into the racing river. But my possession of one of these crude crafts was always short-lived, for some larger boy was sure to carry it off. Once a queer-looking fish, short, thick, and larger than the largest hog we had ever butchered, floated in on a neap tide, lodged among the bulrushes, and for days gave off such a stench that we could not have our daily swim. Later, I learned it was a sturgeon that had become entangled in a fish net.
The Brook, here known as ‘the Creek’ (pronounced ‘crick’), gave itself to the river from between steep-sloping mud banks; and the river received it unheedingly, a perpetual verification of the hard proverb, ‘Unto him that hath shall be given.’
At the mouth of the creek we boys of the neighborhood made our last stand as fishermen. On the left bank of the channel we fished for suckers in the deep water scooped out by an inshore current. To catch suckers in that basin required skill of no mean order, and quite belied the ease implied in the phrase as we use it in human transactions. The best fisherman among us was a hero in a much deeper sense than is any football star. His was the perpetuation of an art that has its roots in savagery, and from savagery comes all that is vital in life.
The first requisite for this sport was a long pole, sometimes thirty feet in length. To find one of just the right slimness and flexibility often required weeks of searching in the deep forest, and the possession was coveted beyond everything else except a breech-loading shotgun. The butt end of this pole was thrust into the mud, and the heavysinkered line swung deftly out well over the water, with a calculating eye for the eddies and ever-shifting currents. The most successful fishermen seemed to have a ‘hunch’ as to where the suckers would run from day to day — never twice in the same place — as they passed upstream in endless thousands on their way from we knew not where to the brooks to spawn. Did they ever return downstream? If so, when? On this point I am quite as ignorant as I was then.
March was the sucker month. Then they were almost as active as trout, and their white flaky meat was good eating. The endless hours I have stood in the mud with a dozen other boys watching my pole as the dark water slipped under it! Often a keen north wind spit snow in our faces, and ice cakes floated by; but there we would stand, without overcoat or mittens, enduring hardships that would send a city boy to his grave.
We would watch in silence the rhythmic swaying of the pole under the recurring tug of the line; then would come the sudden dip of the end, and the owner would pull up with just the right speed to keep the hook fast in the soft round mouth that had taken the bait. The bent pole would suddenly straighten as the fish left the water, its tail spread wide and curved protestingly to one side to catch the air. Usually night was closing down before we young barbarians gathered up our catch and started for home, our cowhide boots coated with mud, our hands chapped and red, and in each heart a song such as only youth and fish and running water can inspire.
Later in the season, when warm nights made it pleasant to be abroad after dark, we would build a fire at the mouth of the creek on the right bank and fish for eels. Eels fried in butter make a dish fit for a king, and a deal too good for some kings I have read about. Why they could be caught from the right bank but not from the left remains a. mystery. They were attracted by our bonfire; and occasionally the flare from added driftwood revealed the face of a seal that had come to the surface to inspect the light. The big black eyes suddenly focused on me always frightened me, for they suggested a drowned man come back to life.
On still warm nights we would catch eels — big salt-water fellows a yard long — nearly as fast as we could bait our hooks. We would toss them into a pile, where, instead of making back for the river, they would coil themselves through and through each other until they formed a great squirming mass. To skin one was a feat indeed, the details of which need not be recorded here. The dried skin was used for tying flail and swingle together, and for ‘snappers’ to whiplashes. By the time the fire had burned low, our hands and clothes were covered with slime, and we would pick our way through the rank marsh grass toward home, our bare feet sensing all sorts of unseen things as accurately as could our eyes by daylight.
I have not seen the Brook for years, and probably never shall see it again; but it remains in memory the most vivid thing of all my life’s experiences. For a growing boy, it was a kingdom of inexhaustible riches, the acquiring of which involved risks, adventures, thrills beside which any that befell me in later life as I wandered about the globe were tame indeed. Time, and time alone, sanctifies, makes sacred. To the boy, beauty is felt, not comprehended, and that which my mind associates with the Brook now was quite inarticulate then. I was just the eternal boy — the savage looking upon the morning of the world and pronouncing it good.
Now that I am gone, has any other young savage succeeded to the overlordship of the Brook? If so, greetings to you, brother! May your kingdom bring you as much joy as it brought the brown-skinned lad who once ruled over it — and loved it.