were filled with boys who, five days in the week and six hours a
day, could "_amo amas amat, amamus amatus amant_" with the best of them.
On Sundays these same boys sat with trousers creeping above the wrinkles
at the ankles of their copper-toed, red-topped boots, recited golden
texts, sang "When He Cometh," and while planning worse for their own
little brothers, read with much virtuous indignation of little Joseph's
wicked brothers, who put him in a pit. After Sunday School was over
these highly respected young persons walked sedately in their best
clothes over the scenes of their Saturday crimes.

They say the woods are gone now. Certainly the trees have been cut away
and the underbrush burned; cornfields cover the former scenes of
valorous achievement; but none the less the woods are there; each nook
and cranny is as it was, despite the cornfields. Scattered about the sad
old earth live men who could walk blindfolded over the dam, across the
millrace, around the bend, through the pawpaw patch to the grapevine
home of the "Slaves of the Magic Tree;" who could find their trail under
the elder bushes in Boswell's ravine, though they should come--as they
often come--at the dead of night from great cities and from mountain
camps and from across seas, and fore-gather there, in the smoke and dirt
of the rendezvous to eat their unsalted sacrificial rabbit. They can
follow the circuitous route around John Betts's hog lot, to avoid the
enemy, as easily to-day as they could before the axe and the fire and
the plough made their fine pretence of changing the landscape. And when
Joe Nevison gets ready to signal them from his seat high in the crotch
of the oak tree across the creek, the "Slaves of the Tree" will come and
obey their leader. They say that the tree is gone, and that Joe is gone,
but we know better; for at night, when the Tree has called us, and we
hear the notes from the pumpkin-stem reed, we come and sit in the
branches beneath him and plan our raids and learn our passwords, and
swear our vengeance upon such as cross our pathway. There may have been
a time when men thought the Slaves of the Tree were disbanded; indeed it
did seem so, but as the years go by, one by one they come wandering
back, take their places in the branches of the magic tree, swing far out
over the world like birds, and summon again the _genius loci_ who has
slept for nearly forty years.

Of course we knew that Joe would be the first one back; he