well picked over by the
squaws, who sold fruit in town by the pailful, but the children managed
to find a few berries, and ate them, enjoying their warm, satiny feel.

Thus they climbed for a long time. The rests were frequent, the course
not of the straightest. For many years their recollection of that hill
was as of a mountain. Finally the top sprang at them abruptly, as though
in joke.

"Come over this way, I'll show you," said Bobby.

He led the way to a point where the scant timber had in times past
suffered a windfall. Through the opening thus made they looked abroad
over the countryside. They could see the snake-fences about the farms,
and the white dusty road like a ribbon and the stumps like black dots,
and the waving green tops of the "wood lots" and far away the flash of
the River.

Thus Bobby gained another of his great desires. Celia proved strangely
acquiescent to suggestions for these excursions. Gerald's dreaded
attractions relaxed their power over Bobby's spirit; and in
corresponding degree Bobby regained the lost captaincy of his soul. The
self-confidence which he lacked seeped gradually into him; and he began,
though very tentatively, to recognize and respect his own value as an
individual. These are big words to employ over the small problems of a
child; yet in the child alone occur those silent developments, those
noiseless changes which touch closest to true abstraction. Later in life
our processes are stiffened by the material into forms of greater
simplicity.

They explored the country about; and what the shortness of their legs
denied them in the matter of actual distance, the largeness of their
children's imaginations lavished bounteously.

Bobby had explored most of it all before--the stump pastures, the
wood-lots, the hills, the beach, the piers, the upper shifting downs of
sand--but now he saw them for the first time because he was showing them
to Celia. One day they made their way under tall beech woods, through a
scrub of cedars, and found themselves on the edge of low bluffs
overlooking the yellow shore and the blue lake. Long years after he
could remember it vividly, and all the little details that belonged to
it--the flash of the waters, the dip of gulls, the gentle wash of the
quiet wavelets against the shore, the thin strip of dark wet sand that
marked the extent of their influences, and, in a long curve to the blue
of distance, the uneven waste of the yellow dry sand on which