s indifference
assumed; and no matter how fair the eyes, no man likes to be looked at,
by eyes that do not see him, or see him only as a blur on the landscape.
Still that marble face stood for much that is dear to the roughest of
hearts and about which men do not talk. So I went on packing damp moss
into the bottom of the bark horn, arranging frail lilies and night
shades about the rim and laying a solid pyramid of violets in the
centre. The mold, through which I was floundering, seemed to merge into
a bog; but the lower reaches were hidden by a thicket of alder bushes
and scrub willows. I mounted a fallen tree and tried to get cautiously
down to some tempting lily-pads. Evidently some one else on the other
side of the brush was after those same bulbs; for I heard the sucking
sound of steps plunging through the mire of water and mud.

"Why, Gillespie," called a voice, "what in the world are you doing
here?" and the boy emerged through the willows gaping at me in
astonishment.

"Just what I want to know of you," said I.

He presented a comical figure. His socks and moccasins had been tied and
slung round his neck. With trousers rolled to his knees, a hatful of
water-lilies in one hand and a sheaf of ferns in the other, he was
wading through the swamp.

"You see," he began sheepishly. "I thought she couldn't--couldn't
conveniently get these for herself, and it would be kind of nice--kind
of nice--you know--to get some for her----"

"Don't explain," I blurted out. "I was trying that same racket myself."

"You know, Gillespie," he continued quite confidentially, "when a man's
been away from his mother and sisters for years and years and years----"

"Yes, I know, babe; you're an octogenarian," I interrupted.

"And feels himself going utterly to the bow-wows without any stop-gear
to keep him from bowling clean to the bottom, a person feels like doing
something decent for a girl like the Little Statue," and the youth
plucked half a dozen yellow flowers as well as the coveted white ones.
"Have some for your basket," said he. His face was puckered into
pathetic gravity. "It's so hanged easy to go to the bow-wows out here,"
he added.

"Not so easy as in the towns," I interjected.

"Ah! but I've been there, gone all through 'em in the towns," he
explained. "That's why the pater packed me off to this wilderness."

And that, thought I, is why the west gets all the credit for the wild
oats gathered in old lands and sown