y.(6) So did
thousands of forest women in those seasons when their communion with a
mystic loneliness was confessed, when they gave tongue as simply as
wild creatures to the nameless stirrings and promptings of that secret
woodland where Pan was still the lord. And the day following the
revival, they were again the silent, expressionless, much enduring,
long-suffering forest wives, mothers of many children, toilers of
the cabins, who cooked and swept and carried fuel by sunlight, and by
firelight sewed and spun.

It can easily be understood how these women, as a rule, exerted little
influence on their sons. Their imaginative side was too deeply hidden,
the nature of their pleasures too secret, too mysterious. Male youth,
following its obvious pleasure, went with the men to the hunt. The women
remained outsiders. The boy who chose to do likewise, was the incredible
exception. In him had come to a head the deepest things in the forest
life: the darkly feminine things, its silence, its mysticism, its
secretiveness, its tragic patience. Abraham was such a boy. It is
said that he astounded his father by refusing to own a gun. He earned
terrible whippings by releasing animals caught in traps. Though he had
in fullest measure the forest passion for listening to stories, the
ever-popular tales of Indian warfare disgusted him. But let the tale
take on any glint of the mystery of the human soul--as of Robinson
Crusoe alone on his island, or of the lordliness of action, as in
Columbus or Washington--and he was quick with interest. The stories of
talking animals out of Aesop fascinated him.

In this thrilled curiosity about the animals was the side of him least
intelligible to men like his father. It lives in many anecdotes: of his
friendship with a poor dog he had which he called "Honey"; of pursuing
a snake through difficult thickets to prevent its swallowing a frog; of
loitering on errands at the risk of whippings to watch the squirrels in
the tree-tops; of the crowning offense of his childhood, which earned
him a mighty beating, the saving of a fawn's life by scaring it off just
as a hunter's gun was leveled. And by way of comment on all this, there
is the remark preserved in the memory of another boy to whom at the time
it appeared most singular, "God might think as much of that little fawn
as of some people." Of him as of another gentle soul it might have been
said that all the animals were his brothers and sisters.(7)

On