In the course of his exploration, he came to the other well, the one in the barn yard with pulley, chain, and big bright tin bucket. He was curious, and began huge experiments. Somehow the bucket got loose from the hook, struck the water with a splash and began to fill. He leaned over the edge in alarm. What was to be done? The bucket began its swaying descent, glinting this way, darkening that way, became dusky and was gone. In its place arose from the well an accusation seeming to say “guilty,” and there arose within and without the child a new world, the world of accountability.
He spent most of his time with his father; the bond of union was the love of the great out-of-doors. Too young to philosophize and search his soul to discover sin, he took all things for granted. It seemed natural to him that there should be flowers, grass, trees, cows, oxen, sunshine and rains, the great open sky, the solid earth underfoot, men, women, children, the great ocean and its rockbound shore. All these he took at their face value—they all belonged to him. He would sit beside his father on a great boulder watching him fish with pole and line. He would remain patiently there, inspirited by the salt breeze, listening to the joyous song of the sea as the ground swells reared and dashed upon the rocks with a mighty shouting, and a roaring recall, to form and break and form again. It seemed to lull him. It was mighty. It belonged to him. It was his sea. It was his father fishing.
One day as he was sitting alone on the boulder his father swung into sight in a row boat, and pulled for the open sea. The child did not know about rowboats, he had not discovered them, he did not understand how they went. Suddenly father and boat disappeared, the child gave a shriek of alarm, then as suddenly man and boat reappeared, to disappear again. The ground-swell running high, the breeze stiffening, the boat with the man grew smaller and smaller at each appearance; there was a flash each time. Smaller grew the boat until it became a speck, then it began to grow bigger and bigger. The child, dumbfounded, ran to meet his father, in wild excitement, at the landing. His father, very patient in such matters, explained it all as best he could, and the child listened eagerly, with some understanding. What was said must be true, because his father, who knew everything had said so. But what he knew, all of himself, and beyond the knowledge of others, was that the sea was a monster, a huge monster that would have swallowed up his father, like one of the giants he had told his grandmama about, if his father had not been such a big strong man. He felt this with terror and pride. Thus arose in prophecy the rim of another world, a world of strife and power, on the horizon verge of a greater sea.
For the remainder of the summer, nothing of special import occurred. The family returned to the city.
When all were settled, he was sent to the primary school of that district. He reported to the family at the end of the first day that teacher had called him to the platform to lead the singing. What a dreary prison the primary school of that day must have been. His recollection of his stay there is but a gray blank. Not one bright spot to recall, not one stimulus to his imagination, not one happiness. These he found only at home. He learned his letters, he followed the routine, that is all. Nor were there any especially memorable events at home until the matter of the farm came up and was discussed interminably. He had been merely enlarging his geographical boundaries, and exhausting the material. The primary school had, for the moment, dulled his faculties, slackened his frank eagerness, ignored his abundant imagination, his native sympathy. Even the family influence could not wholly antidote this. The neighborhood was growing disreputable. Next came the farm.
II
“There was a child went forth every day.”
Whitman
Thus after traversing a long orbit inversely to the prehistoric of the family genealogy, and tracing, on the backward swing, the curve of a little one’s experience in contact with the outer world and his individual impulsive responses thereto, we again take the train for South Reading.
Arriving at the station a man descends, asks directions, and follows the first dirt road to the left, leading over an almost treeless flat, and heading for a somewhat distant hill. Part way up the hill he notices a house on the right. Here lived a man named Whittemore, who having lost a leg, proceeded in due consideration of the remaining one, to invent, perfect and manufacture a new type of crutch, which has remained the standard to this day. The workshop stood some distance back of the house, just at the beginning of the pine woods that covered part of the hill. The road here takes a curve to the right, traverses the back of the hillside with a heavy growth of pines on the right ascension, and a neat valley to the left with scattering woods and meadow. The road then straightens, becomes of easy grade, and begins to emerge from the wilderness, so to speak. An orchard comes into view on the left, a field of herds-grass on the smoothly rounded hilltop at the right. Straight ahead, running at the right angles and terminating the road thus far traversed, was the main road from South Reading to
