and the two came down the hill,
the child's head full of visions of a pirate's treasure, and the
mother's full of the whims of the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.

The next day school began in Sycamore Ridge,--for the school and the
church came with the newspaper, _Freedom's Banner_,--and a new world
opened to the boy, and he forgot the cave, and became interested in
Webster's blue-backed speller. And thus another grown-up person, "Miss
Lucy," came into his world. For with children, men and women
generically are of another order of beings. But Miss Lucy, being John
Barclay's teacher, grew into his daily life on an equality with his
dog and the Hendricks boys, and took a place somewhat lower than his
mother in his list of saints. For Miss Lucy came from Sangamon County,
Illinois, and her father had fought the Indians, and she told the
school as many strange and wonderful things about Illinois as John had
learned from his mother about Haverhill. But his allegiance to the
teacher was only lip service. For at night when he sat digging the
gravel and dirt from the holes in the heels of his copper-toed boots,
that he might wad them with paper to be ready for his skates on the
morrow, or when he sat by the wide fireplace oiling the runners with
the steel curly-cues curving over the toes, or filing a groove in the
blades, the boy's greatest joy was with his mother. Sometimes as she
ironed she told him stories of his father, or when the child was sick
and nervous, as a special favour, on his promise to take the medicine
and not ask for a drink, she would bring her guitar from under the bed
and tune it up and play with a curious little mouse-like touch. And on
rare occasions she would sing to her own shy maidenly accompaniment,
her voice rising scarcely higher than the wind in the sycamore at the
spring outside. The boy remembered only one line of an old song she
sometimes tried to sing: "Sleeping, I dream, love, dream, love, of
thee," but what the rest of it was, and what it was all about, he
never knew; for when she got that far, she always stopped and came to
the bed and lay beside him, and they both cried, though as a child he
did not know why.

So the winter of 1857 wore away at Sycamore Ridge, and with the coming
of the spring of '58, when the town was formally incorporated, even into
the boy world there came the murmurs of strife and alarms. The games the
boys played were war games. They had battles in the woods, betwee