rest-shaded, bird-serenaded, wide-awake dreaming passed over this
one's wind-tossed locks between the ages of eight and fifteen.

Small wonder that he dreamed. Much of the stuff that fables and fairy
tales are made of was the actual furnishment of his visible
world--unbroken leagues of lofty timber that had never heard the ring of
an axe; sylvan labyrinths where the buck and doe were only half afraid;
copses alive with small game; rare openings where the squatter's wooden
ploughshare lay forgotten; dark chasms scintillant with the treasures of
the chemist, if not of the lapidary; outlooks that opened upon great
seas of billowing forest, whence blue mountains peered up, sank and rose
again like ocean monsters at play; glens where the she-bear suckled her
drowsing cubs to the plash of yeasty waterfalls that leapt and whimpered
to be in human service, but wherein the otter played all day unscared;
crags where the eagle nested; defiles that echoed the howl of wolves
unhunted, though the very stones cried out their open secret of
immeasurable wealth; narrow vales where the mountain cabin sent up its
blue thread of smoke, and in its lonely patch strong weeds and emaciated
corn and cotton pushed one another down among the big clods; and vast
cliffs from whose bushy brows the armed moonshiner watched the
bridle-path below.

These dreams of other children's story-books were John's realities. And
these were books to him, as well, while Chesterfield went unread, and
other things and conditions, not of nature and her seclusions, but
vibrant with human energies and strifes, were making, unheeded of him,
his world and his fate. A little boy's life does right to loiter. But if
we loiter with him here, we are likely to find our eyes held ever by the
one picture: John's gifted mother, in family group, book in her
lap--husband's hand on her right shoulder--John leaning against her left
side. Let us try leaving him for a time. And, indeed, we may do the same
as to Jeff-Jack Ravenel.

As he had told Barbara he would, he made his residence in Suez.

A mess-mate, a graceless, gallant fellow, who at the war's end had
fallen, dying, into his arms, had sent by him a last word of penitent
love to his mother, an aged widow. She lived in Suez, and when Ravenel
brought this message to her--from whom marriage had torn all her
daughters and death her only son--she accepted his offer, based on a
generous price, to take her son's room as her sole bo