hat way, or, what was almost as
rare, a neighbor. Many a winter night I have lain awake under the skins,
listening to a flow of language that held me spellbound, though I
understood scarce a word of it.

"Virtuous and vicious every man must be,
Few in the extreme, but all in a degree."

The chance neighbor or traveller was no less struck with wonder. And
many the time have I heard the query, at the Cross-Roads and elsewhere,
"Whar Alec Trimble got his larnin'?"

The truth is, my father was an object of suspicion to the frontiersmen.
Even as a child I knew this, and resented it. He had brought me up in
solitude, and I was old for my age, learned in some things far beyond my
years, and ignorant of others I should have known. I loved the man
passionately. In the long winter evenings, when the howl of wolves and
"painters" rose as the wind lulled, he taught me to read from the Bible
and the "Pilgrim's Progress." I can see his long, slim fingers on the
page. They seemed but ill fitted for the life he led.

The love of rhythmic language was somehow born into me, and many's the
time I have held watch in the cabin day and night while my father was
away on his hunts, spelling out the verses that have since become part of
my life.

As I grew older I went with him into the mountains, often on his back;
and spent the nights in open camp with my little moccasins drying at the
blaze. So I learned to skin a bear, and fleece off the fat for oil with
my hunting knife; and cure a deerskin and follow a trail. At seven I
even shot the long rifle, with a rest. I learned to endure cold and
hunger and fatigue and to walk in silence over the mountains, my father
never saying a word for days at a spell. And often, when he opened his
mouth, it would be to recite a verse of Pope's in a way that moved me
strangely. For a poem is not a poem unless it be well spoken.

In the hot days of summer, over against the dark forest the bright green
of our little patch of Indian corn rippled in the wind. And towards
night I would often sit watching the deep blue of the mountain wall and
dream of the mysteries of the land that lay beyond. And by chance, one
evening as I sat thus, my father reading in the twilight, a man stood
before us. So silently had he come up the path leading from the brook
that we had not heard him. Presently my father looked up from his book,
but did not rise. As for me, I had been staring for some time in
astonishm