Tip Pulsifer leaned on my gate

The horse went down

"And I'm his widder"

Then Tim came

Old Captain

When we three sit by the fire

THE SOLDIER OF THE VALLEY

I

I was a soldier. I was a hero. You notice my tenses are past. I am a
simple school-teacher now, a prisoner in Black Log. There are no bars
to my keep, only the wall of mountains that make the valley; and look
at them on a clear day, when sunshine and shadow play over their green
slopes, when the clouds all white and gold swing lazily in the blue
above them, and they speak of freedom and of life immeasurable. There
are no chains to my prison, no steel cuffs to gall the limbs, no guards
to threaten and cow me. Yet here I stay year after year. Here I was
born and here I shall die.

I am a traveller. In my mind I have gone the world over, and those
wanderings have been unhampered by the limitations of mere time, for I
know my India of the First Century as well as that of the Twentieth,
and the China of Confucius is as real to me as that of Kwang Su.
Without stirring from my little porch down here in the valley I have
pierced the African jungles and surveyed the Arctic ice-floes. Often
the mountains call me to come again, to climb them, to see the real
world beyond, to live in it, to be of it, but I am a prisoner. They
called to me as a boy, when wandering over the hills, I looked away to
them, and over them, into the mysterious blue, picturing my India and
my China, my England and my Russia in a geographical jumble that began
just beyond the horizon.

Then I was a prisoner in the dungeons of Youth and my mother was my
jailer. The day came when I was free, and forth I went full of hope,
twenty-three years old by the family Bible, with a strong, agile body
and a homely face. I went as a soldier. For months I saw what is
called the world; I had glimpses of cities; I slept beneath the palms;
I crossed a sea and touched the tropics. Marching beneath a blazing
sun, huddling from the storm in the scant shelter of the tent, my
spirits were always keyed to the highest by the thought that I was
seeing life and that these adventures were but a fore-taste of those to
come. But one day when we marched beneath the blazing sun, we met a
storm and found no shelter. We charged through a hail of steel. They
took me to the sea on a stretcher, and by and by they shipped me home.
Then it was that I was a hero--when I came again to