And the prosaic life of the sweet home does not at all
correspond to the boy's dreams of the world. In the good old days, I
am told, the boys on the coast ran away and became sailors; the
countryboys waited till they grew big enough to be missionaries, and
then they sailed away, and met the coast boys in foreign ports.
John used to spend hours in the top of a slender hickory-tree that a
little detached itself from the forest which crowned the brow of the
steep and lofty pasture behind his house. He was sent to make war on
the bushes that constantly encroached upon the pastureland; but John
had no hostility to any growing thing, and a very little bushwhacking
satisfied him. When he had grubbed up a few laurels and young
tree-sprouts, he was wont to retire into his favorite post of
observation and meditation. Perhaps he fancied that the wide-swaying
stem to which he clung was the mast of a ship; that the tossing forest
behind him was the heaving waves of the sea; and that the wind which
moaned over the woods and murmured in the leaves, and now and then
sent him a wide circuit in the air, as if he had been a blackbird on
the tip-top of a spruce, was an ocean gale.
Pages:
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122