The Day of His Youth

								

came, Ernest Hume looked into his son's brown eyes and asked,--
"Now shall we go back?"
"No! no! no!" cried the boy, with a child's passionate cumulation of
accent.
"Not when the snow comes?"
"No, father."
"And the lake is frozen over?"
"No, father."
"Then," said Hume, with a sigh of great content, "we must have a
log-cabin, lest our bones lie bleaching on the shore."
Next morning he went into the woods with Pierre and two men hastily
summoned from the village, and there they began to make axe-music, the
requiem of the trees. The boy sat by, dreaming as he sometimes did for
hours before starting up to throw himself into the active delights of
swimming, leaping, or rowing a boat. Next day, also, they kept on
cutting into the heart of the forest. One dryad after another was
despoiled of her shelter; one after another, the green tents of the
bird and the wind were folded to make that sacred tabernacle--a home.
Sometimes Francis chopped a little with his hatchet, not to be left out
of the play, and then sat by again, smoothing the bruised fern-forests,
or whistling back the squirrels who freely chattered out their opinions
on invasion. Then came other days just as mild winds were fanning the
forest into gold, when the logs went groaning through the woods, after
slow-stepping horses, to be piled into symmetry, tightened with
plaster, and capped by a roof. This, windowed, swept and garnished,
with a central fireplace wherein two fires could flame and roar, was
the log-cabin. This was home. The hired builders had protested against
its primitive form; they sighed for a snug frame house, French roof and
bay windows. "'Ware the cold!" was their daily croak.
"We'll live in fur and toughen ourselves," said Ernest Hume. And
turning to his boy that night, when they sat together by their own
fire, he asked,--
"Shall we fashion our muscles into steel, our skin into armor? Shall we
make our eyes strong enough to face the sun by day, and pure enough to
meet the chilly stars at night? Shall we have Nature for our only love?
Tell me, sir!"
And Francis, who hung upon his father's voice, even when the words were
beyond him, answered, "Yes, father, please!" and went on feeding birch
strips to the fire, where they turned from vellum to mysterious missals
blazoned by an unseen hand.
The idyl continued unbroken for twelve years. Yet it was not wholly
idyllic, for, even with money multiplying for them out in the world,
there were hard personal conditions against which they had to fight.
Ernest Hume delighted in the fierceness of the winter wind, the cold
resistance of the snow; cut off, as he honestly felt himself to be,
from spiritual growth, he had great joy in strengthening his physical
being until it waxed into insolent might. Francis, too, took so happily
to the stern yet lovely phases of their life that his father never
thought of possible wrong to him in so shaping his early years. As for