e from
their roots and ran at us, and when Nathan dodged them, they swung down
their branches to blind us with their leaves, and sometimes almost to
lift us in the air like Absalom. The memory of Absalom was very clear
in my mind, for just a week before I had seen his picture in our
Sunday-school quarterly, and now, confused in my eyes with the dancing
trees, I saw him, as I had seen him in the picture, suspended from a
limb by his long hair, quietly waiting to be taken down. There was
something more than a mere coincidence in that Sunday-school lesson.
Here was another warning neglected. With Mr. Pound and Stacy Shunk,
Miss Spinner took a place as a prophetess. She had taught me that boys
who mocked their respectable elders were eaten by bears, and I believed
her. She had demonstrated beyond all doubt that boys who defied their
parents and ran away from home must come to a dreadful end in the
entangling limbs of trees. With Absalom's example before me I had run
away from home, and here I was being carried through the forest on a
mad steed, and here were the trees running at me from every side,
reaching out their forked limbs to seize my hair. Penelope was
forgotten. More than once I tried to avert my impending fate by
letting go of Nathan's mane and taking my chances with his heels and
the stony path, but as I was about to close my eyes and let myself go
he rose in the air, and the distance between me and the earth seemed so
stupendous as to become the greater peril. Had the mule kept on his
wild career I might at last have gathered courage for the fall, but the
path came to an end, our pace slackened, the trees took root again; I
was conscious of Penelope's encircling arms, and raising my head saw
that we were in a broad road, and, better still, we were climbing the
hill; each step was carrying us nearer the clearest and bluest of skies
that always held over my home; I knew that from that line where ridge
and sky met, I should look down and see home itself.

We reached the top of the ridge, and the valley lay beneath us. It was
young and cheerful in its fresh green, with here a brown checkering of
fallow, and there a white barn glistening in the sun, and orchards in
the full glory of their blossom. Below us a stone mill grumbled over
its unending task, and from the meadows came the blithe call of the
killdee. It was all home to me from the fringing pines on the
ridge-top, across the land to the mountains b