om stunted pines that flung shriveled arms to the sky and dropped dead
cones to the sterile earth, here he remained unmolested.

In the lower part of the hut he kept his basket stuff and his collection
of two-legged and three-legged chairs. In the course of evolution they
never sprouted another leg, those chairs; as they were given to him,
so they remained. The upper floor served for his living-room, and was
reached by a ladder from the ground, for there was no stairway inside.

No one had ever been in the little upper chamber. When a passer-by
chanced to be-think him that Tom's hermitage was close at hand, he
sometimes turned in his team by a certain clump of white birches and
drove nearer to the house, intending to remind Tom that there was a
chair to willow-bottom the next time he came to the village. But at
the noise of the wheels Tom drew in his ladder; and when the visitor
alighted and came within sight, it was to find the inhospitable host
standing in the opening of the second-story window, a quaint figure
framed in green branches, the ladder behind him, and on his face a kind
of impenetrable dignity, as he shook his head and said, "Tom ain't ter
hum; Tom's gone to Bonny Eagle."

There was something impressive about his way of repelling callers; it
was as effectual as a door slammed in the face, and yet there was a sort
of mendacious courtesy about it. No one ever cared to go further;
and indeed there was no mystery to tempt the curious, and no spoil to
attract the mischievous or the malicious. Any one could see, without
entering, the straw bed in the far corner, the beams piled deep with
red and white oak acorns, the strings of dried apples and bunches of
everlastings hanging from the rafters, and the half-finished baskets
filled with blown bird's-eggs, pine cones, and pebbles.

No home in the village was better loved than Tom's retreat in the
blueberry plains. Whenever he approached it, after a long day's tramp,
when he caught the first sight of the white birches that marked the
gateway to his estate and showed him where to turn off the public road
into his own private grounds, he smiled a broader smile than usual, and
broke into his well-known song:

"I'd much d'ruth-er walk in the bloom-in' gy-ar-ding,
An' hear the whis-sle of the jol-ly
--swain."

Poor Tom could never catch the last note. He had sung the song for more
than forty years, but the memory of this tone was so blurred, and his