e might easily imagine this peculiar boy who chose to remain at home
while the men went out to slay, as the mere translation into masculinity
of his mother, and of her mothers, of all the converging processions
of forest women, who had passed from one to another the secret of their
mysticism, coloring it many ways in the dark vessels of their suppressed
lives, till it reached at last their concluding child. But this would
only in part explain him. Their mysticism, as after-time was to show, he
had undoubtedly inherited. So, too, from them, it may be, came another
characteristic--that instinct to endure, to wait, to abide the issue of
circumstance, which in the days of his power made him to the politicians
as unintelligible as once he had been to the forest huntsmen.
Nevertheless, the most distinctive part of those primitive women, the
sealed passionateness of their spirits, he never from childhood to the
end revealed. In the grown man appeared a quietude, a sort of tranced
calm, that was appalling. From what part of his heredity did this
derive? Was it the male gift of the forest? Did progenitors worthier
than Thomas somehow cast through him to his alien son that peace they
had found in the utter heart of danger, that apparent selflessness which
is born of being ever unfailingly on guard?

It is plain that from the first he was a natural stoic, taking his
whippings, of which there appear to have been plenty, in silence,
without anger. It was all in the day's round. Whippings, like other
things, came and went. What did it matter? And the daily round, though
monotonous, had even for the child a complement of labor. Especially
there was much patient journeying back and forth with meal bags between
his father's cabin and the local mill. There was a little schooling,
very little, partly from Nancy Lincoln, partly from another good woman,
the miller's kind old mother, partly at the crudest of wayside schools
maintained very briefly by a wandering teacher who soon wandered on; but
out of this schooling very little result beyond the mastery of the A B
C.(8) And even at this age, a pathetic eagerness to learn, to invade the
wonder of the printed book! Also a marked keenness of observation. He
observed things which his elders overlooked. He had a better sense of
direction, as when he corrected his father and others who were taking
the wrong short-cut to a burning house. Cool, unexcitable, he was
capable of presence of mind. Once a