ere happening all about. Old Pop, the brush-cutter, had arrived,
with his deadly one-handed ax, and was busy in the lower brook lot--a
desperate place of briers and brush and poison ivy. He was a savage
worker. The thorns stung him to a pitch of fighting madness, and he
went after them, careless of mishap. Each evening he came up out of that
vicious swamp, bleeding at every pore, his massive shoulders hunched
forward, his super-normal arms hanging until his huge hands nearly swept
the ground.

[Illustration]

Pop in action was a fascinating sight. Few things could be finer than to
see him snatch away a barbed-wire entanglement of blackberry-bushes,
clutch a three-inch thorn sapling with his hairy left, and with one
swing of his terrible right cut the taproot through. I had figured that
it would take a month to clear away that mess along the brook, but on
the evening of the fifth day Pop had the last bit of its tangle cut and
piled. Of such stuff were warriors of the olden time. Given armor and a
battle-ax, and nothing could have stood before him. One could imagine
him at Crecy, at Agincourt, at Patay. Joan of Arc would have kept him at
her side.

Pop had another name, but everybody called him "Old Pop" and he seemed
to prefer it. He was seventy years old and a pensioner. There was a week
when his check came that he did no work, but remained dressed up, and I
fear did not always get the worth of his money. Never mind, he had
earned relaxation. An ancient hickory-tree in the brook meadow had been
broken by a March storm. Old Pop and his son Sam had it cut, split, and
sawed into fireplace lengths in a little while. That is, comparatively.
I think they were two or three days at it, while it had taken nature a
full hundred and sixty years to get the old tree ready for them. I
counted the rings. The figures impressed me.

It was--let us say--as old as the old house. It had been a straight
young tree of thirty years or so when the Revolutionary began, and it
saw the recruits of Brook Ridge march by to join Putnam, who had a camp
on a neighboring hill. There were Reeds and Meekers and Burrs and Todds
and Sanfords in that little detachment, and their uniforms were not very
uniform, and their knapsacks none too well filled. There was no rich
government behind them to vote billions for defense, no camps that were
cities sprung up in a night, no swift trains to whirl them to their
destination. Where they went they walked, throu