That Fortune | Page 4

top of
a tall hickory, the advance picket of a mountain forest. The tree was on
the edge of a steep declivity of rocky pasture-land that fell rapidly
down to the stately chestnuts, to the orchard, to the cornfields in the
narrow valley, and the maples on the bank of the amber river, whose
loud, unceasing murmur came to the lad on his aerial perch like the
voice of some tradition of nature that he could not understand.
He had climbed to the topmost branch of the lithe and tough tree in
order to take the full swing of this free creature in its sport with the
western wind. There was something exhilarating in this elemental battle
of the forces that urge and the forces that resist, and the harder the wind
blew, and the wider circles he took in the free air, the more stirred the
boy was in the spring of his life. Nature was taking him by the hand,
and it might be that in that moment ambition was born to achieve for
himself, to conquer.
If you had asked him why he was there, he would very likely have said,
"To see the world." It was a world worth seeing. The prospect might be
limited to a dull eye, but not to this lad, who loved to climb this height,

in order to be with himself and indulge the dreams of youth. Any
pretense would suffice for taking this hour of freedom: to hunt for the
spicy checker-berries and the pungent sassafras; to aggravate the
woodchucks, who made their homes in mysterious passages in this
gravelly hillside; to get a nosegay of columbine for the girl who spelled
against him in school and was his gentle comrade morning and evening
along the river road where grew the sweet-flag and the snap-dragon and
the barberry bush; to make friends with the elegant gray squirrel and
the lively red squirrel and the comical chipmunk, who were not much
afraid of this unarmed naturalist. They may have recognized their
kinship to him, for he could climb like any squirrel, and not one of
them could have clung more securely to this bough where he was
swinging, rejoicing in the strength of his lithe, compact little body.
When he shouted in pure enjoyment of life, they chattered in reply, and
eyed him with a primeval curiosity that had no fear in it. This lad in
short trousers, torn shirt, and a frayed straw hat above his mobile and
cheerful face, might be only another sort of animal, a lover like
themselves of the beech-nut and the hickory-nut.
It was a gay world up here among the tossing branches. Across the
river, on the first terrace of the hill, were weather-beaten farmhouses,
amid apple orchards and cornfields. Above these rose the wooded dome
of Mount Peak, a thousand feet above the river, and beyond that to the
left the road wound up, through the scriptural land of Bozrah, to high
and lonesome towns on a plateau stretching to unknown regions in the
south. There was no bar to the imagination in that direction. What a
gracious valley, what graceful slopes, what a mass of color bathing this
lovely summer landscape! Down from the west, through hills that
crowded on either side to divert it from its course, ran the sparkling
Deerfield, from among the springs and trout streams of the Hoosac,
merrily going on to the great Connecticut. Along the stream was the
ancient highway, or lowway, where in days before the railway came the
stage-coach and the big transport-wagons used to sway and rattle along
on their adventurous voyage from the gate of the Sea at Boston to the
gate of the West at Albany.
Below, where the river spread wide among the rocks in shallows, or

eddies in deep, dark pools, was the ancient, long, covered, wooden
bridge, striding diagonally from rock to rock on stone columns, a dusky
tunnel through the air, a passage of gloom flecked with glints of
sunlight, that struggled in crosscurrents through the interstices of the
boards, and set dancing the motes and the dust in a golden haze, a
stuffy passage with odors a century old--who does not know the
pungent smell of an old bridge?--a structure that groaned in all its big
timbers when a wagon invaded it. And then below the bridge the lad
could see the historic meadow, which was a cornfield in the eighteenth
century, where Captain Moses Rice and Phineas Arms came suddenly
one summer day to the end of their planting and hoeing. The house at
the foot of the hill where the boy was cultivating his imagination had
been built by Captain Rice, and in the family burying-ground in the
orchard above it lay the body of this