LITMIR.BIZ

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wher’s Minna to, Sammy? – that’s wot I comed vor to ax ‘ee.’

      ‘Down to vield by lake, yander, most like,’ Sam answered with a nod of his head in the direction indicated.

      ‘I’ll go an’ vetch her,’ said Geargey; ‘dinner’s most ready.’

      ‘An I’ll come an’ zee wot Colin’s up to,’ added Sam, laying down his hoe, and pulling together his unbuttoned waistcoat.

      They walked down to the brook in the meadow, and saw the two children sitting in the corner so intent upon their artistic performances that they hardly noticed the approach of their respective fathers. Old Sam Churchill went close up and looked keenly at the clay figure of Minna that Colin was still moulding with the last finishing touches as the two elders approached them. ‘Thik ther vigger baint a bad un, Colin,’ he said, taking it carefully in his rough hand.

      ‘’ee’aven’t done it none so ill, lad; but it don’t look so livin’ like as it ‘ad ought to. Wot do ‘ee think it is, Geargey, eh? tell us?’

      ‘Why, I’m blowed if that baint our Minna,’ Geargey answered, with a little gasp of open-mouthed astonishment. ‘It’s her vurry pictur, Colin: a blind man could see that, of course, so soon as ‘e set eyes on it. ‘Ow do ‘ee do it, Colin, eh? ‘Ow do ‘ee do it?’ ‘Oh, that baint nothin’,’ Colin said, colouring up. ‘Only a little bit o’ clay, just made up vor to look like Minna.’

      ‘Look ‘ee ‘ere,’ Colin,’ his father went on, glancing quickly from the clay to little Minna, and altering a touch or two with his big clumsy fingers, not undeftly. ‘Look ‘ee ‘ere; ‘ee must putt the dress thik way, I should say, with a gurt dale more flusterin’ about it; it do zit too stiff and starchy, somehow, same as if it wur made o’ new buckram. ‘ee must put in a fold or two, ‘ere, so as to make un sit more nat’ral. Don’t ‘ee see Minna’s dress do double itself up, I can’t rightly say ‘ow, but sununat o’ tkik there way?’ And he moulded the moist clay a bit with his hands, till the folds of the drapery began to look a little more real and possible.

      ‘I’d ought to ‘ave drawed it first, I think,’ Colin said, looking at the altered dress with a satisfied glance. ‘’ave ‘ee got such a thing as a pencil about ‘ee, father?’

      Old Sam took a piece of pencil from his pocket, and handed it to Colin. The boy held it tightly in his fingers, with a true artistic grasp, like one who knows how to wield it, and with a few strokes on a scrap of paper hit off little Minna far better than he had done in the plastic material. Geargey looked over his shoulder with a delighted grin on his weatherbeaten features. ‘I tell ‘ee, Sam,’ he said to the old gardener, confidentially, ‘it’s my belief that thik ther boy’ull be able one o’ these vine days to paint rale picturs.’

      CHAPTER III. PERNICIOUS LITERATURE

      When winter came, Hiram Winthrop had less to do and more time to follow the bidding of his own fancy. True, there was cordwood to split in abundance; and splitting cordwood is no child’s play along the frozen shores of Lake Ontario. You go out among the snow in the wood-shed, and take the big ice-covered logs down from the huge pile with numbed fingers: then you lay them on a sort of double St. Andrew’s cross, its two halves supported by a thwart-piece, and saw them up into fit lengths for the kitchen fireplace: and after that you split them in four with a solid-headed axe, taking care in the process not to let your deadened hands slip, so as to cut off the ends of your own toes with an ill-directed blow glancing off the log sideways. Yes, splitting cordwood is very serious work, with the thermometer at 40° below freezing; and drawing water from the well when the rope is frozen and your skin clings to the chill iron of the thirsty bucket-handle is hardly better: yet in spite of both these small drawbacks, Hiram Winthrop found much more to enjoy in his winters than in his summers. There was no corn to hoe, no peas to pick, no weeding to do, no daily toil on farm and garden. The snow had covered all with its great white sheet; and even the neighbourhood of Muddy Creek Dépôt looked desolately beautiful in its own dreary, cold, monotonous, Siberian fashion.

      The flowers and leaves were gone too, to be sure; but in the low brushwood by the blackberry bottom the hares had turned white to match the snow; and the nut-hatches were answering one another in their varying keys; and the skunks were still busy of nights beneath the spreading walnuts; and the chickadees were tinkling overhead among the snow-laden pine-needles of the far woodland. All the summer visitors had gone south to Georgia and the gulf: but the snow-buntings were ever with Hiram in the wintry fields: and the bald-headed eagles still prowled around at times on the stray chance of catching a frozen-out racoon. Above all there was ease and leisure, respite from the deacon’s rasping voice calling perpetually for Hiram here, and Hiram there, and Hiram yonder, to catch the horses, or tend the harrow, or mind the birds, or weed the tomatoes, or set shingles against the sun over the drooping transplanted cabbages. A happy time indeed for Hiram, that long, weary, white-sheeted, unbroken northern New York winter.

      Sam Churchill was with the deacon still, but had little enough to do, for there isn’t much going on upon an American farm from November to April, and the deacon would gladly have got rid of his hired help in the slack time if he could have shuffled him off; but Sam had been well advised on his first hiring, and had wisely covenanted to be kept on all the year round, with board and lodging and decent wages during the winter season. And Hiram initiated Sam into the mysteries of sliding on a bent piece of wood (a homemade toboggan) down the great snowdrifts, and skating on the frozen expansion of Muddy Creek, and building round huts, Esquimaux fashion, with big square blocks of solid dry snow, and tracking the white hare over the white fields by means of the marks he left behind him, whose termination, apparently lengthening itself out miraculously before one’s very eyes, marked the spot where the hare himself was hopping invisible to human vision. In return, Sam lent him a few dearly-treasured books: books that he had brought from England with him: the books that had first set the Dorsetshire peasant lad upon his scheme of going forth alone upon the wide world beyond the ocean.

      Hiram was equally delighted and astonished with these wonderful charmed volumes. He had seen a few books before, but they were all of two types: Cornell’s Geography, Quackenboss’s Grammar, and the other schoolbooks used at the common school; or else Barnes’s Commentary, Elder Coffin’s Ezekiel, the Hopkinsite Confession of Faith, and other like works of American exegetical and controversial theology. But Sam’s books, oh, gracious, what a difference! There was Peter Simple, a story about a real live boy, who wa’n’t good, pertickler, not to speak of, but had some real good old times on board a ship, somewhere, he did; and there was Tom Jones (Hiram no more understood the doubtful passages in that great romance than he understood the lucubrations of Philosopher Square, but he took it in, in the lump, as very good fun for all that), Tom Jones, the story of another real live boy, with, most delightful of all, a reg’lar mean sneak of a feller, called Blifil, to act as a foil to Tom’s straightforward pagan flesh-and-bloodfulness; the Buccaneers of the Caribbean Sea, a glorious work of fire and slaughter, whar some feller or other got killed right off on every page a’most, you bet; Jake the Pirate, another splendid book of the same description; and half a dozen more assorted novels, from the best to the worst, all chosen alike for their stirring incidents which went straight home to the minds of the two lads, in spite of all external differences of birth and geographical surroundings. Hiram pored over them surreptitiously, late at nights, in the room that he and Sam occupied in common – a mere loft at the top of the house and felt in his heart he had never in his life imagined such delightful reading could possibly have existed. And they were written by growed-up men, too! How strange to think that once upon a time, somewhile and somewhere, there were growed-up men capable of thus sympathising with, and reproducing the ideas and feelings of, the natural mind of boyhood!

      One evening, very late – eleven nearly – the deacon, prowling around after a bottle or something, spied an unwonted light gleaming down from the trap-door that led up to the loft where the lads ought at that moment to have been sleeping soundly. Lights in a well-conducted farmhouse at eleven o’clock was indeed incomprehensible: what on earth, the deacon asked himself wonderingly, could them thar lads be up to at this hour? He crept up the step-ladder cautiously, so as not to disturb them by premonitions, and opened the trap-door in sedulous silence. Sam was

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