Jim met me at the station. I knew it was Jim when I caught sight of him loping along the platform, craning his neck, his head on one side as if in search of someone. He had the same stoop in his shoulders; the same long, disjointed, shambling body—six feet and more of it—that had earned him his soubriquet.

"Guess you be him," he said, recognizing me as easily, his face breaking suddenly into a broad smile as I stepped on to the platform. "Old man 'lowed I'd know ye right away, but I kind o' mistrusted till I see ye stop and look 'raound same's if ye'd lost the trail. I'll take them traps and that bag if ye don't mind," and he relieved me of my sketch-kit and bag. "Buck-board's right out here behind the freight shed," and he pointed across the track. "Old mare's kinder skeery o' the engine, so I tied her a piece off."

He was precisely the man I had expected to find—even to his shaggy gray hair matted close about his ears, wrinkled, leathery face, and long, scrawny neck. He wore the same rough, cowhide boots and the very hat I had seen so often reproduced—such a picturesque slouch of a hat with that certain cant to the rim which betokens long usage and not a little comfort, especially on balsam boughs with the sky for a covering, and only the stars to light one to bed.

I had heard all these several details and appointments described ever so minutely by an enthusiastic brother brush who had spent the preceding summer with old man Marvin—Jim's employer—but he had forgotten to mention, or had failed to notice, the peculiar softness of Jim's voice and his timid, shrinking eyes—the eyes of a dog rather than those of a man—not cowardly eyes, nor sneaking eyes—more the eyes of one who had suffered constantly from sudden, unexpected blows, and who shrank from your gaze and dodged it as does a hound that misunderstands a gesture.

"Old man's been 'spectin' ye for a week," Jim rambled on as he led the way to the shed, hitching up his one leather suspender that kept the brown overalls snug up under his armpits. "P'raps ye expected him to meet ye," he continued, "but ye don't know him. He ain't that kind. He won't go even for Ruby."

"Who's Ruby?" The brother brush had not mentioned him. "Mr. Marvin's son?"

"No, she's Mother Marvin's girl. She's away to Plymouth to school. Stand here a minute till I back up the buck-board."

The buck-board is the only vehicle possible over these mountain-roads. It is the volante of the Franconia range, and rides over everything from a bowlder to a wind-slash. This particular example differed only in being a trifle more rickety and mud-bespattered than any I had seen; and the mare had evidently been foaled to draw it—a fur-coated, moth-eaten, wisp-tailed beast, tied to the shafts with clothes-lines and scraps of deerhide—a quadruped that only an earthquake could have shaken into nervousness. And yet Jim backed her into position as carefully as if she had felt her harness for the first time, handing me the reins until he strapped my belongings to the hind axle, calling "Whoa, Bess!" every time she rested a tired muscle. Then he lifted one long leg over the dash-board and took the seat beside me.

It was my first draught of a long holiday; my breathing-spell; my time for loose neckties and flannel shirts and a kit slung over my shoulder crammed with brushes and color-tubes; my time for loafing and inviting my soul. It felt inexpressibly delightful to be once more out in the open—out under the wide sweep of the sky; rid of the choke of narrow streets; exempt of bens, mails, and telegrams, and free of him who knocks, enters, and sits—and sits—and sits. And it was the Indian summer of the year; when the air is spicy with the smoke of burning leaves and the mountains are lost in the haze; when the unshaven cornfields are dotted with yellow pumpkins and under low-branched trees the apples lie in heaps; when the leaves are aflame and the round sun shines pink through opalescent clouds.

"Ain't it a hummer of a day?" Jim exclaimed, suddenly, looking toward the valley swimming in a silver mist below us. "By Jiminy! it makes a man feel like livin', don't it?"

I turned to look at him. He, too, seemed to have caught the infection. His shoulders had straightened, his nostrils were dilated like a deer's that sniffs some distant scent; his face was aglow. I began to wonder if, with my usual luck, I had not found the companion I always looked for in my outings—that rare other fellow of the right kind, who responds to your slightest wish with all the enthusiasm and gusto of a boy, and so vagabondish in his tendencies that he is delighted to have you think for him and to follow your lead.

I had not long to wait. Before we had gone a mile into the forest Jim jerked the mare back upon her haunches and, pointing to a great hemlock standing sentinel over us, cried out with boyish enthusiasm:

"Take a look at him once. Ain't he a ring-tailed roarer? Seems to me a tree big as him must be awful proud just o' bein' a tree. Ain't nothin' 'raound here kin see's fur as he kin, anyways." "My luck again," I thought to myself. I knew I could not be mistaken in the outward signs.

"You like trees, then?" I asked, watching the glow on his face.

"Like 'em! Well, wouldn't you if ye'd lived 'mong 'em long's I have? Trees don't never go back on ye, and that's what ye can't say o' everything." The analogy was obscure, but I attributed it to Jim's slender stock of phrases. "I've knowed that hemlock ever since I come here, and he's just the same to me as the fust day I see him. Ain't never no change in trees; once they're good to ye they're allus good to ye. Birds is different—so is cattle—but trees and dogs ye kin tie to. Don't the woods smell nice? Do ye catch on to them spruces dead ahead of us? Maybe ye can't smell 'em till ye git yer nose cleared out o' them city nosegays," he continued, with a kindly interest in his voice. "But ye will when ye've been here a spell. Folks that live in cities think there ain't nothin' smells sweet but flowers and cologne. They ain't never slep' on balsam-boughs nor got a whiff o' a birchbark fire, nor tramped a bed o' ferns at night. There's a cool, fresh smell for ye! I tell ye there's a heap o' perfumes 'raound that ye can't buy at a flower-store and cork up in a bottle. Well, I guess—Git up, Bess!" and he flopped the reins once more along the ridges and hollows of the mare's back while he encouraged her to renewed efforts with that peculiar clucking sound heeded only by certain beasts of burden.

At the end of the tenth mile he stopped the mare suddenly.

"Hold on," he cried, excitedly, "there's that scraggy-tail. I missed him when I come down. See! there he is on that green log. I was feared he'd passed in his chips." I looked and saw a huge gray squirrel with a tail like a rabbit. "That's him. Durn mean on his tail, warn't it? And one paw gone, too. The dog catched him one day last year and left him tore up that way. I found him limping along when I was a-sugaring here in the spring and kinder fixed him up, and he's sorter on the lookout for me when I come along. He's got a hole 'round here somewheres."

Jim sprang out of the buck-board. Fumbling under the seat he brought out a bag of nuts. The squirrel took them from his hand, stuffing his mouth full, five at a time, limping away to hide them, and back again for more until the bag was empty, Jim, contented and unhurried, squatting on the ground, his long knees bent under him. The way in which he did this gave me infinite delight. No vagabond I had ever known ignored time and duty more complacently.

We drove on in silence, Jim taking in everything we passed. This shambling, slenderly educated, and clay-soiled man was fast looming up as a find of incalculable value—the most valuable of my experience. The most important thing, however, was still to be settled if a perfect harmony of interests was to be established between us—would he like me?

Marvin's cabin, in which I was to spend my holiday, lay on a clearing half a mile or more outside the woods and at the foot of a hill that helped prop up the Knob. The stage road ran to the left. The house was a small two-story affair built of logs and clapboards, and was joined to the outlying stable by a covered passage which was lined with winter firewood. Marvin, who met us at the pasture-gate, carried a lantern, the glow of the twilight having faded from the mountain-tops. He was a small, thick-set man, smooth-shaven as far as the under side of his chin and jaws, with a whisk-broom beard spread over his shirt-front and half of his waistcoat. His forehead was low, and his eyes set close together—sure sign of a close-fisted nature.

To my great surprise his first words, after a limp handshake and a perfunctory "pleased to see you," were devoted to an outbreak on Jim for having been so long on the road. "Been waitin' here an hour," he said. "What in tarnation kep' ye, anyway? Them cows ain't milked yit!"

"Don't worry. I won't go back on them cows," replied Jim, quietly, as he drove through the gateway, following Marvin, who walked ahead swinging the lantern to show the mare the road.

Mrs. Marvin's manner was as abrupt as that of her husband.

"Well, well!" she said, as I stepped upon the porch, "guess you must be beat out comin' so fur. Come in and set by the stove," and she resumed her work in the pantry without another word.

I was not offended at her curtness. These denizens of the forest pass too many hours alone and speak too seldom to understand the value of politeness for politeness' sake. The wife, moreover, redeemed herself the next morning when I found her on the back porch feeding the birds.

"Snow ain't fur off," she remarked, in explanation, as she scattered the crumbs about, "and I want 'em to larn early where they kin find something to eat. Ruby'd never forgive me if I didn't feed the birds. She loves 'em 'bout as much as Jim does."

Neither she nor her husband became any more cordial as they knew me better. To them I was only the boarder whose weekly stipend helped to decrease the farm debt, and who had to be fed three times a day and given a bed at night. It was Jim who made me feel at home. He was the fellow I had longed for; the round peg of a chance acquaintance that exactly fitted into the round hole of my holiday life, and he fulfilled my every expectation. He would fish or hunt or carry a sketch-trap or wash brushes, or loaf, or go to sleep beside me—or get up at daylight—whatever the one half of me wanted to do, Jim, the other half, agreed to with instant cheerfulness.

And yet, in spite of this constant companionship, I never crossed a certain line of reserve which he had set up between us. He would ramble on by the hour about the things around us; about the trees, the birds, and squirrels; of the way the muskrats lived by the sawmill dam, and their cleverness in avoiding his traps; about the deer that "yarded" back of Taft's Knob last winter, and their leanness in the spring. Sometimes he would speak of Mother Marvin, saying she "thought a heap of Ruby, and ought to," and now and then he would speak of Ruby with a certain tender tone in his voice, telling me of the prizes she had won at school, and how nobody could touch her in "'rithmetic and readin'." But, to my surprise, he never discussed any of his private affairs with me. I say "surprise," for until I met Jim I had found that men of his class talked of little else, especially when over campfires smouldering far into the night.

This reticence also extended to Marvin's affairs. The relations between them, I saw, were greatly strained, although Jim always discharged his duties conscientiously, never failing to render a strict account of the time he spent with me, which Marvin always itemized in the weekly bill. I used often to wonder if he were not under some obligation to his employer which he could not requite; it might be for food and shelter in his earlier days, or perhaps that he was weighted by a money debt he was unable to pay.

One morning, after a particularly ugly outbreak in which Jim had been denounced for some supposed neglect of his duties, I asked him, then lying beside me, his head cupped upon his saucer of a slouch hat, why he stayed on with a man like Marvin, so different from himself in every way. I had often wondered why Jim stood it, and wished that he had the spirit to try his fortunes elsewhere. In my sympathy for him I had even gone so far as to hint once or twice at my finding him other employment. Indeed, I must confess that the only cloud between us dimming my confidence in him was this very lack of independence.

"Well, I got to git along with him for a spell yit," Jim answered, slowly, his eyes turned up to the sky. "He is ornery, and no mistake, and I git mad at him sometimes; but then ag'in I feel kinder sorry for him somehow. He's a queer kind, ain't he, to be livin' up here all his life with trees and mountains all 'round him, all doin' their best to please him—and I don't know nothin' friendlier nor honester—and yet him bein' what he is? I'd 'a' thought they'd thawed him out 'fore this. And he's so dog-goned close, too, if I must say it. Why, if it warn't for Mother Marvin, some o' us 'raound here"—and he stopped and lowered his voice—"would be out in the cold; some ye wouldn't suspect, too."

This apparently studied reticence only incited my curiosity to learn something more of the man for whom I had begun to have a real affection. I wanted particularly to know something of his life before he came to Marvin's!—twelve years now. I could not, of course, ask Marvin or his wife for any details—my intimacy with Jim forbade such an invasion of his privacy—and I met no one else in the forest. I saw plainly that he was not a mountaineer by birth. Not only did his dialect differ from those about him, but his habits were not those of a woodsman. For instance, he would always carry his matches loose in his pocket, instead of in a dry box; then, again, he would wear his trousers rolled up like a fireman's, as if to keep out the wet, instead of tucking them into his boots to tramp the woods the better. Now and then, too, he would let fall some word or expression which would betray greater familiarity with the ins and outs of the city than with the intricacies of the forest.

"It was fixed up in a glass case like one Abe Condit used to have in his place in the Bowery," he said once in describing a prize trout some city fisherman had stuffed and framed. But when I asked him, with some surprise, if he knew the Bowery, he looked at me quickly, with the slightest trace of offended dignity in his eyes, as if I had meant to overstep the line between us, and answered quickly:

"I knowed Abe Condit," and immediately changed the conversation.

And yet I must admit that there was nothing in the way he answered this and all my other questions that weakened my confidence in his sincerity. If there were any blackened pages in his past record that he did not want to lay bare even to me, they were discolored, I felt sure, more by privations and suffering than by any stains he was ashamed of.

II

One morning at daybreak I was awakened by Jim swinging back my door. He had on his heavy overcoat and carried a lantern. His slouch hat was flattened on the back of his head; the rim flared out, framing his face, which was wreathed in smiles. He seemed to be under some peculiar excitement, for his breath came thick and fast.

"Sorry to wake ye, but I'm goin' to Plymouth," and he lowered his head and stepped inside my room. "Ruby's comin'. Feller brought me a letter she'd sent on by the stage. The driver left it at the sawmill. I'd 'a' told ye las' night, but ye'd turned in."

"When will you be back?" I called out from between the bedclothes. We had planned a trip to the Knob the next day, and were to camp out for the night. He evidently saw my disappointment in my face, for he answered quickly, as he bent over me:

"Oh, to-night, sure; and maybe Ruby'll go along. There ain't nothin' ye kin teach her 'bout campin', and she'll go anywheres I'll take her—leastways, she allus has." This last was said with some hesitation, as if he had suddenly thought that my presence might make some difference to her. "Leave yer brushes where I kin git 'em," he continued, anxious to make up for my disappointment. "I'll wash 'em when I git back," and he clattered down the steep stairs and slammed the door behind him.

I jumped from my bed, threw up the narrow, unpainted sash and watched his tall, awkward figure swinging the lantern as he hurried away toward the shed where the gray mare lived in solitude. Then I crept back to bed again to plan my day anew.

When I joined Marvin at breakfast I found him in one of his ugliest moods, with all his bristles out; not turned toward me, nor even toward his wife, but toward the world in general. Strange to say, he made no allusion to his daughter's return nor to Jim's absence.

Suddenly his wife blurted out, as if she could restrain her joy no longer:

"You ain't never seen Ruby. She's comin' tonight. Jim's gone for her. The head teacher's sick and some o' the girls has got a holiday."

"Yes," I answered, quietly; "Jim told me."

"Oh, he did!" And she put down her cup and leaned across the table. "Well, I'm awful glad she's comin', just so ye kin see her. Ye won't never forgit her when ye do. She's got six months more, then she's comin' home for a spell until she goes teachin'," and a look of exultant pride and joy of which I had never believed her capable came into her eyes.

Marvin turned his head and in a half-angry way said:

"It's 'bout time. Little good ye've had o' her for the last four years with yer fool notions 'bout eddication." And he put on his hat and went out.

"How old is your daughter?" I asked, more to soften the effect of Marvin's brutal remark than anything else.

"She's seventeen, I guess, but she's big for her age."

The announcement came as a surprise. I had supposed from the way Jim had always spoken of her that she was a child of twelve. The possibilities of her camping out became all the more remote.

"And has she been away from you long this time?"

"'Bout four months. I didn't 'spect her to come till Christmas, till she wrote Jim to come for her. He allus fetches her. They'll be 'long 'bout dark."

I instantly determined to extend the heartiest of welcomes to this little daughter, not alone because of the mother and Jim, but because the home-coming of a young girl had always appealed to me as one of the most satisfying of all family events. My memory instinctively went back to the return of my own little bird, and of the many marvellous preparations begun weeks before in honor of the event. I saw again in my mind the wondrous curtains, stiff and starched, hung at the windows and about the high posts of the quaint bedstead that had sheltered her from childhood; I remembered the special bakings and brewings and the innumerable bundles, big and little, that were tucked away under secretive sofas and the thousand other surprises that hung upon her coming. This little wood-pigeon should have my best attention, however simple and plain might be her plumage.

Moreover, I was more than curious to see what particular kind of a fledgling could be born to these two parent birds—one so hard and unsympathetic and the other so kind and simple. Jim, I remembered, had always spoken enthusiastically of Ruby, but then Jim always spilled over the edges whenever he spoke of the things he loved, whether they were dogs, trees, flowers, or brilliant young maidens.

At nine o'clock that night my ear caught the sound of wheels; then came Jim's "Whoa! Bess," and the mother threw wide the door and caught her daughter in her arms.

"Oh, mother!" the girl cried, "wasn't it good I could come?" and she kissed her again. Then she turned to me—I had followed out in the starlight—"Uncle Jim sent me word you were here, and I was so glad. I've always wanted to see somebody paint, and Uncle Jim says he's sure you will let me go sketching with you. I wasn't coming home with the other girls until I got his letter and knew that you were here."

She said this frankly and simply, without the slightest embarrassment, and without a trace of any dialect in her speech. Jim evidently had not exaggerated her attainments. She had, too, unconsciously to herself, solved one of the mysteries that surrounded me. If Jim was her uncle it must be on her mother's side; it certainly could not be on Marvin's.

"And I'm glad, too," I replied. "Of course you shall go, and Jim tells me also that you are as good a woodsman as he is. And so Jim's your uncle, is he? He never told me that."

"Oh, no," she answered quickly, with a little deprecatory air. "He isn't my real uncle. He's just Jim, but I've always called him Uncle Jim ever since I was a little girl. And I love him dearly; don't I, Uncle Jim?" and she turned toward him as he entered the door carrying her bundle, followed by her father with the kerosene lamp, Marvin having brought it out to help Jim unload the buck-board.

"That's what ye allus says, baby-girl," answered Jim, "so I got to believe it. And if I didn't, there wouldn't be no use o' livin'—not a mite." There was a vibrating tenderness in the man's voice, and an indescribable pathos in its tone, as he spoke, that caused me instinctively to turn my head and look into his face.

The light shone full upon it—so full and direct that there were no shadows anywhere. Whether it was because of the lamp's direct rays or because of his long ride in the crisp November air, I could not decide, but certain it was that Jim's face was without a wrinkle, and that he looked twenty years younger. Even the hard, drawn lines about his mouth and nose had disappeared.

With the light of the lamp came another revelation. While the girl's cheap woollen dress and jacket, of a pattern sold in the country stores, showed her to be the product of Marvin's home and the recipient of his scanty bounty, her trim, well-rounded figure, soft, glossy hair—now that her hat was off—and small hands and feet, classed her as one of far gentler birth. There was, too, as she passed in and out of the room helping her mother with the supper-table, a certain grace and dignity, especially in the way in which she bent her head on one side to listen, a gesture often seen in a drawing-room, but never, in my experience, in a cabin. What astonished me most, however, were her hands—her exquisitely modelled hands, still ruddy from the fresh night air, but so wonderfully curved and dimpled. And then, too, the perfect graciousness and simplicity of her manner and its absolute freedom from coquetry or self-consciousness. Her mother was right—I would not soon forget her. And yet, by what freak of Nature, I found myself continually repeating, had this flower been made to bloom on this soil? Through what ancestor's veins had this blood trickled, and through what channels had it reached these humble occupants of a forest home?

But if her mother was the happier for her coming, Jim, radiant with joy, seemed to walk on air. His head was up, his arms were swinging free, and there was a lightness and spring in his movements that made me forget the grotesqueness of his gait. Nor, as the days went by, did this buoyant happiness ever fail him. He and Ruby were inseparable from the time she opened the rude door of her bedroom in the morning until she bade us all good-night and carried with her all the light and charm and joyousness of the day. The camping-out, I may as well state, had been given up as soon as I had mentioned it, she saying to me with a little start, as if frightened at the proposition, that she thought she'd better stay home and help her mother. Then, seeing Jim's face fall, she added, "But we can be off all day, can't we?"

And Jim answered that it was all right, just as Ruby said—that we would go fishing instead, and that he had spotted an old trout that lived in a hole down the East Branch that he'd been saving for her, and that he had tied the day before the "very fly that will fix him"—all of which was true, for Ruby landed him the next day with all the skill of a professional, besides a dozen smaller ones whose haunts Jim knew.

And so the weeks flew by, Ruby tramping the forest daily between us or sitting beside me as I painted, noting every stroke of my brush and asking me innumerable questions as to the choice of colors and the mixing of the tints. At other times she would ply me with questions, making me tell her of the things I had seen abroad and of the cities and peoples she had read of; or she would talk of the books she had studied, and of others she wanted to read. Jim would listen eagerly, with a certain pride in his eyes that she knew so much and could talk so well, and when we were alone he would comment on it:

"Nearly catched ye, didn't she? I see once or twice ye were stumped clean out o' yer boots on them questions she fired. How her little head holds it all is what bothers me. But I always knowed how it would be; I told the old man so ten year ago. Ain't one o' 'em 'raound here kin touch her."

At night, under the kerosene lamp in the cabin, she would ask me to read aloud, she looking up into my face and drinking in every word, the others listening, Jim watching every expression that crossed her face.

Dear old Jim! I still see your tender, shrinking eyes peering at her from under your bushy eyebrows and still hear the low ripple of your merry laugh over her volleys of questions. You were so proud of her and so happy in those days! So tender in touch, so gentle of voice, so constant in care!

One morning I had some letters to write, and Ruby and Jim took the rods and went up the brook without me. They both begged me to go, Ruby being particularly urgent, I thought, but I had already delayed the mail too long and so refused point-blank—too abruptly, perhaps, as I thought afterward, when I remembered the keen look of disappointment in her face. When she re-entered the cabin alone an hour later she passed me hurriedly, and calling out to her father that Jim was wanted at the sawmill to fix the wheel and would not be back until morning, shut herself into her room before I could offer myself in Jim's place—which I would gladly have done, now that her morning's pleasure had been spoiled.

When she joined us at supper—she had kept her room all day—I saw that her eyes were red, as if she had been crying. I knew then that I had offended her.

"Ruby, I really couldn't go," I said. "You don't feel cross about it, do you?"

"Oh, no," she answered, with some earnestness. "And I knew you were busy."

"And about Jim—what's the matter with the wheel?" I asked, greatly relieved at the discovery that whatever troubled her, my staying at home had not caused it.

"One of the buckets is broken—Uncle Jim always fixes it," and she turned her head away to hide her tears.

"Is Jim a carpenter, too?" I asked, with a smile.

"Why, yes," she replied. "Didn't you know that? They often send for him to fix the mill. There's no one else about here who can." And she changed the conversation and began talking of the beauty of that part of the brook where they had been to fish, and of the rich brown tint of the water in the pools, and how lovely the red sumachs were reflected in their depths.

The next morning, and without any previous warning, Ruby appeared in her cloth dress and jacket and announced her intention of taking the stage back to Plymouth, adding that as Jim had not returned, Marvin must drive her over to the cross-roads. I offered my services, but she declined them graciously but firmly, bidding me good-by and saying with one of her earnest looks, as she held my hand in hers, that she should never forget my kindness to Jim, and that she would always remember me for what I had done for him, and then she added with peculiar tenderness:

"And dear Uncle Jim won't forget you, either."

And so she had gone, and with her had faded all the light and joyousness of the place.

When Jim returned the next day I was at work in the pasture painting a group of white birches. I hallooed to him as he shambled along within a hundred yards of me, swinging his arms, but he did not answer except to turn his head.

That night at table he replied to my questions in monosyllables, explaining his not stopping when I had called in the morning by saying that he didn't want to "'sturb me," and when I laughed and told him—using his own words—that Ruby "wouldn't pass a fellow and give him the dead, cold shake," he pushed back his chair with a sudden impatient gesture, said he had forgotten something, and left the table without a word or look in reply.

I knew then that I had hurt him in some way.

"What's the matter with Jim, Mr. Marvin? He seems put out about something. Did he say anything to you?" I asked, astonished at Jim's behavior, and anxious for some clew by which to solve its mystery.

"Got one o' his spells on. Gits that way sometimes, and when he does ye can't git no good out o' him. I want them turnips dug, and he's got to do it or git out. I ain't hired him to loaf 'round all day with Ruby and to sulk when she's gone. I'm a-payin' him wages right along, ain't I?" he added with some fierceness as he stopped at the door. "What he gits for fixin' the mill ain't nothin' to me—I don't git a cent on it."

III

When the morning came and Jim had not returned I started for the mill. I found him alone, sitting idly on a bench near the water-wheel. I had heard the hum of the saw before I reached the dam and knew that he had finished his work.

"Jim," I said, walking up to him and extending my hand, "if I have done anything to hurt your feelings, I'm sorry. If I had known you would have been put out by my not going with Ruby I would have let the mail wait."

He took my hand mechanically, but he did not raise his eyes. The old look had returned to his face, as if he were afraid of some sudden blow. "I did all I could to make Ruby's visit a happy one—don't you know I did?" I continued.

He leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees, his eyes still on the ground. There was something infinitely pathetic in the attitude. "Ye ain't done nothin' to me," he answered, slowly, "and ye ain't done nothin' to Ruby. I cottoned to ye fust time I see ye, and so did Ruby, and we still do. It ain't that."

"Well, what is it, then? Why have you kept away from me?"

He arose wearily until his whole length was erect, hooked his long arms behind his back, and began walking up and down the platform. He was no longer my comrade of the woods. The spring and buoyancy of his step had gone out of him. He seemed shrivelled and bent, as if some sudden weakness had overcome him. His face was white and drawn, and the eyelids drooped, as if he had not slept.

At the second turn he stopped, gazed abstractedly at the boards under his feet, as a man sometimes does when his mind is on other things. Mechanically he stooped to pick up a small iron nut that had slipped from one of the bolts used in repairing the wheel, and in the same abstracted way, still ignoring me, raised it to his eye, looked through the hole for a moment, and then tossed it into the dam. The splash of the iron striking the water frightened a bird, which arose in the air, sang a clear, sweet note, and disappeared in the bushes on the opposite bank. Jim started, turned his head quickly, following the flight of the bird, and sank slowly back upon the bench, his face in his hands.

"There it is again," he cried out. "Every way I turn it's the same thing. I can't even chuck nothin' overboard but I hear it."

"Hear what?" The keen anguish expressed in his voice had alarmed me.

"That song-sparrow—did ye hear it? I tell ye this thing'll drive me crazy. I tell ye I can't stand it—I can't stand it." And he turned his head and covered his face with his sleeve.

The outburst and gesture only intensified my anxiety. Was Jim's mind giving away? I arose from my seat and bent over him, my hand on his arm.

"Why, that's only a bird, Jim—I saw it—it's gone into the bushes."

"Yes, I know it; I seen it; that's what hurts me; that's what's allus goin' to hurt me. And 'tain't only goin' to be the birds. It's goin' to be the trees and the gray-backs and the trout we catched, and everywhere I look and every place I go to it's goin' to be the same thing. And it ain't never goin' to be no better—never—never—long as I live. She said so. Them was her very words I ain't never goin' to forgit 'em." And he leaned his head in a baffled, tired way against the planking of the mill.

"Who said so, Jim?" I asked.

Jim raised his head, looked me straight in the face and, with the tears starting in his eyes, answered in a low voice:

"Ruby. She loves 'em—loves every one o' 'em. Oh, what's goin' to become o' me now, anyhow?"

"Well, but I don't—" The revelation came to me before I could complete the sentence. Jim's face had told the story of his heart!

"Jim," I said, laying my hand on his shoulder, "do you love Ruby?"

"Sit down here," he said, in a hopeless, despondent voice, "and mebbe I'll git grit enough to tell ye. I ain't never told none o' the folks that comes up here o' how things was, but I'm goin' to tell you. And I'm goin' to tell it to ye plumb from the beginnin'. too." And a sigh like the moan of one in pain escaped him.

"Twelve years ago I come here from New York. I'd been cleaned out o' everything I had by a man I trusted, and I was flat broke. I didn't care where I went, so's I got away from the city and from people. I wanted to git somewheres out into the country, and so I got aboard the train and kep' on till I'd struck Plymouth. There my money gin out and I started up the road into the mountains. I thought I'd hire out to some choppers for the winter. When night come I see a light and knocked at the door and Jed opened it. He warn't goin' to keep me, but he was a-buildin' the shed where the old mare is now, and he found out I was handy with the tools and didn't want no wages, only my board, so he let me stay. The next spring he hired me regular and give me wages every month. I kep' along, choppin' in the winter and helpin' 'round the place, and in summer goin' out with the parties that come up from the city, helpin.' 'em fish and hunt. I liked that, for I loved the woods ever since I was a boy, when I used to go off by myself and stay days and nights with nothin' but a tin can o' grub and a blanket. That's why I come here when I went broke.

"One summer there come a feller from Boston to fish. He brought his wife along, and T used to go out with both o' 'em. The man's wife was puttin' up for some o' them children's homes, and she used to talk to Marm Marvin about takin' one o' the children and what a comfort it would be to the child to git out into the fresh air, and one mornin' 'fore she left she took Jed down in the woods and talked to him, and the week after she left for home Marm Marvin sent me over to the station—same place I fetched ye—and out she got with a tag sewed on her jacket and her name on it, and a bundle o' clothes no bigger'n your head. She was 'bout seven or eight years old, and the cunnin'est young un ye ever see. Jus' the same eyes she's got now, only they looked bigger, 'cause her cheeks was caved in."

"Not Ruby, Jim!" I cried, in astonishment.

"Yes, Ruby. That's what was on the tag."

"And she isn't Marvin's child?"

"No more'n she's yourn, nor mine. She ain't nobody's child that anybody knows about. She's jus' Ruby, and that's all there is to her.

"Well, by the time I'd got her out to the farm and had heared her talk and seen her clap her hands at the chippies, and laugh at the birds, and go half wild over every little thing she'd see, I knowed I'd got hold o' something that filled up every crack o' my heart. And she didn't come a day too soon, for Jed had got so ugly there warn't no livin' with him, and I'd made up my mind to quit, and I would if he hadn't took a streak ag'in Ruby at the start. Then I knowed where my trail led. And arter that I never let her out o' my sight. Marm Marvin was different. She never had no child o' her own, and she warmed up to Ruby more'n more every day, and she loves her now much as she kin love anything.

"That fust winter we had a good deal o' snow and I made a pair o' leggins for her out o' a deer's skin I'd killed, and rigged up a sled, and I'd haul her after me wherever I went, and when school opened down to the cross-roads I'd haul her down and bring her back if the snow warn't too deep, and when summer come she'd go 'long jus' the same. I taught her to fish and shoot, and often she'd stay out in camp with me all night when I was tendin' the sugar-maples—she sleepin' on the balsams with my coat throwed over her.

"Things went on this way till 'bout three years ago, when I see she warn't gittin' ahead fast as she could, and I went for the old man to send her to school down to Plymouth. Marm Marvin was willin', but Jed held out, and at last he give in after my talkin' to him. So I hooked up the buck-board and drove her down to Plymouth and left her, with her arms 'round my neck and the tears streamin' down her face. But she was game all the same, only she hated to have me leave her.

"Every July and Christmas I'd go for her, and she'd allus be waitin' for me at the head o' the stairs or would come runnin' down with her arms wide open, and she'd kiss me and hug me and call me dear Uncle Jim, and tell me how she loved me, and how there warn't nothin' in the world she loved so much; and then when she'd git home we'd tramp the woods together every chance we got."

Jim stopped and bent forward, his face in his hands, his elbows on his knees. For a time he was silent; then he went on:

"This last time when I went for her she pretty nigh took my breath away. She seemed just as glad to see me, but she didn't git into my arms as she ueeter, and she looked different, too. She had growed every way bigger, and wider, and older. I kep' a-lookin' at her, tryin' to find the little girl I'd left some months afore, but she warn't there. She acted different, too—more quiet like and still, so that I was feared to touch her like I useter, and took it out in talkin' to her and listenin' to all she told me o' what she was larnin' and how this winter she was goin' to git through and git her certificate, and then she was goin' to teach and help her mother—she allus called Marm Marvin mother. Then she told me o' how one o' the teachers—a young fellow from a college—was goin' to set up a school o' his own and goin' to git some o' the graduates to help teach when he got started, and how he had asked her to be one o' 'em, and how she was goin' with him.

"Since you been here and us three been together and I begun to see how happy she was a-talkin' to you and askin' you questions, I got worse'n ever over her. I begun to see that I warn't what I had been to her. When we was trampin' and fishin' it was all right and she'd talk to me 'bout the ways o' the birds and what flowers come up fust and all that, but when it got to geography and history I warn't in it with her, and you was. That sickened me more'n ever. Pretty soon I began to feel as if everything I had in life war slippin' away from me. I didn't want her to shut me out from anything she had. I wanted to have half, same's we allus had—half for me and half for her. Why, lately, when I lay awake nights a-thinkin' it over, I've wished sometimes that she hadn't growed up at all, and that she'd allus be my baby-girl and I her Uncle Jim.

"Yesterday mornin'—" Jim's voice broke, and he cleared his throat. "Yesterday mornin' we went down the branch, as ye know, and she was a-settin' on a log throwin' her fly into the pool, when one o' them song-sparrows lit on a bush and looked at her, and begin to sing like he'd bust his little chest, and she sung back at him with her eyes a-laughin' and her hair a-flyin', and I stood lookin' at her and my heart choked up in my throat, and I leaned over and took the rod out o' her hand.

"'Baby-girl,' I says, 'there ain't a bird 'round here that ain't got a mate; and that's what makes 'em so happy. I ain't got nobody but you, Ruby—don't go 'way from me, child—stay with me.' And I told her. She looked at me startled like, same as a deer does when he hears a dog bark; then she jumped up and begin to cry.

"'Oh, Jim—Jim—dear Jim!' she says. 'I love you so, and you've been so good to me all my life, but don't—don't never say that to me again. That can never be—not so long as we live.' And she dropped down on the ground and cried till she couldn't git her breath. Then she got up and kissed my hands and went home, leavin' me there alone feelin' like I'd fell off a scaffoldin' and struck the sidewalk."

Jim arose from his seat and began pacing the platform again. I had not spoken a word through his long story.

"Jim," I began, "how old are you?"

"Forty-two," he said, in a patient, listless way.

"More than twice as old as Ruby, aren't you? Old enough, really, to be her father. You love her, don't you—love her for herself—not yourself? You wouldn't let anything hurt her if you could help it. You were right when you said every bird has its mate. That's true, Jim, and the way it ought to be—but they mate with this year's birds, not last year's. When men get as old as you and I we forget these things sometimes, but they are true all the same."

"I know it," he broke out, "I know it; you can't tell me nothin' about it. I thought it all over more'n a hundred times lately. I could bite my tongue off for sayin' what I did to her, and spilin' her visit, but it's done now and I can't help it, and I've got to stay here and bear it."

"No, Jim, don't stay here. So long as she sees you around here she'll be unhappy, and you will be equally miserable. Go away from here; find work somewhere else."

"When?" he said, quietly.

"Now; right away; before she comes back at Christmas."

"No, I can't do it, and I won't. Not till she graduates and gits her certificate. That'll be next June."

"What's that got to do with it?"

"Got a good deal to do with it. If I should leave now jes's winter's comin' on I mightn't git another job, and she'd have to come home and her eddication be sp'ilt."

"What would bring her home?" I asked in surprise.

"What would bring her home?" he repeated, with some irritation. "Why they'd send her if the bills warn't paid—that's what Marm Marvin couldn't help her, and Jed wouldn't give her a cent. Them school-bills, you know, I've always paid out o' my wages—that's why Jed let her go. No; I'll stick it out here till she finishes, if it kills me. Baby-girl sha'n't miss nothin' through me."

One beautiful spring day I swung back the gate of a garden on the outskirts of the village of Plymouth and walked up a flower-bordered path to a cottage porch smothered in vines.

Ruby was standing in the door, her hands held out to me. I had not seen her for years. Her husband had not returned yet from their school, but she expected him every minute.

"And dear old Jim?" I asked. "What has become of him?"

"Look," she said, pointing to a shambling, awkward figure stooping under the apple-trees, which were in full bloom. "There he is, picking blossoms with little Ruby. He never leaves her for a minute."