Pocket Island | Page 8

he is
sent to a little brown schoolhouse a mile away and finds a small crowd
of boys and girls, only two or three of whom he ever saw before. One
of them is the girl who looked wonderingly at him a year previous. He
tells her he knows what her name is, and feels a little hurt because that
fact does not seem to interest her. He studies his lessons because he is
told he must, and plays hard because he enjoys it. He feels no special
attraction toward any of his schoolmates until one winter day this same
little blue-eyed girl asks him for a place on his sled. He shares it with
her as a well-behaved boy should, and so begins the first faint bond of
feeling that like a tiny rill on the hillside slowly gathers power, until at

last, a mighty river, it sweeps all other feelings before it.
How slowly that rippling rill of feeling grew during the next few years
need not be specified. Like other boys of his age, he feels at times
ashamed of caring whether she notices him or not, and again the
incipient pangs of jealousy, because she notices other boys. In a year he
begins to bring her flag-root in summer, or big apples in winter, and
although her way home is different from his, he occasionally feels
called upon to accompany her, heedless of the fact that it costs him an
extra half-mile and fault-finding at being late home. He passes
unharmed through the terrors of speaking pieces on examination day,
and when St. Valentine's day comes he conquers the momentous task of
inditing a verse where "bliss" rhymes with "kiss" upon one of those
missives which he has purchased for five cents at the village store, and
timidly leaves it where this same girl will find it, in her desk at school.
On two occasions during the last summer at the district school,
he--quite a big boy now--joins the older boys and girls under a large
apple tree that grows near the schoolhouse, and plays a silly game, the
principal feature of which consists in his having to choose some girl to
kiss. As he knows very well whom he prefers, and has the courage to
kiss her when his turn comes, that seems a most delightful game; and
although he and other boys who were guilty of this proceeding are
jeered at by the younger ones, the experience makes such an impression
on him that he lies awake half the first night thinking about it.
But all too soon to him comes the end of schooldays and especially the
charming companionship of this particular fair-haired girl. On the last
day she asks him to write in her album, and he again indulges in rhyme
and inscribes therein a melancholy verse, the tenor of which is a hope
that she will see that his grave is kept green, as such an unhappy duty
must, in the near future, devolve upon some one. She in turn writes him
a farewell note of similar tone, and encloses a lock of her hair tied with
a blue ribbon. He has planned to walk home with her when the last day
ends, and perhaps participate in a more tender leave-taking, but she
rides home with her parents, and so that sweet scheme is foiled. With a
heavy heart he watches her out of sight and then, feeling that possibly

he may never see her again, takes his books and turns away from the
dear old brown schoolhouse for the last time. He locks the curl of hair
and her note up in a tin box where he keeps his fish-hooks, and resumes
his unending round of hard work and chores. His horizon has enlarged
a good deal, for he is now twelve years old--but it does not yet include
Liddy.
It is over a year before he sees her again, though once, when given a
rainy half-day to fish in Ragged Brook, he, like a silly boy, deserts that
enticing stream for an hour and cuts across lots near her home in hopes
that he may see her again, but fails.
Then one summer day a surprise comes to him. Half a mile from his
home, and in the direction his thoughts often turn, is a cedar pasture
where blackberries grow in plenty, and here he is sent to pick them. It
is here, and while unconscious what Fate has in store for him, that he
suddenly hears a scream, and running toward him, down the path
comes a girl in a short dress with a calico sun-bonnet flying behind her,
until almost at his feet she stumbles and falls and there, sprawling on
the grass, is--Liddy.
In an instant he is