. The image was not formed or
coloured like young Narcissus, of whom he had never heard, but he
observed it with interest. He was fourteen, and old for his years. The
eyes reflected in the stream were brooding, the mouth had lost its
boyish curves, the sanguine cheek was thin, the jaw settling square. His
imagination, slow to quicken, had, when aroused, quite a wizard might.
He sank deeper amid the ironweed, forgot his errand, and began to dream.
He was the son of a tobacco-roller, untaught and unfriended, but he
dreamed like a king. His imagination began to paint without hands images
of power upon a blank and mighty wall, and it painted like a young
Michael Angelo. It used the colours of immaturity, but it conceived with
strength. "When I am a man--" he said aloud; and again, "When I am a
man--" The eyes in the pool looked at him yearningly; the leaves from
the golden hickories fell upon the water and hid him from himself. In
the distance a fox barked, and Gideon Rand's deep voice came rolling
through the wood: "Lewis! Lewis!"

The boy dipped the pail, lifted it brimming, and rose from his knees. As
he did so, a man parted the bushes on the far side of the stream,
glanced at the mossed and slippery stones rising from its bed, then with
a light and steady foot crossed to the boy's side. He was a young man,
wearing a fringed hunting-shirt and leggins and a coonskin cap, and
carrying a long musket. Over his shoulder was slung a wild turkey, and
at his heels came a hound. He smiled, showing very white teeth, and drew
forward his bronze trophy.

"Supper," he said briefly.

The boy nodded. "I heard your gun. I've made a fire yonder beneath a
black gum. Adam Gaudylock, I am well-nigh a man!"

"So you be, so you be," answered the other; "well-nigh a man."

The boy beat the air with a branch of sumach. "I want to be a man! But I
don't want to be a tobacco-roller like my father, nor--"

"Nor a hunter like me," the other finished placidly. "Be the Governor of
Virginia, then, or come with me and make yourself King of the
Mississippi! I've watched you, boy! You're growing up ambitious,
ambitious as What's-his-name--him that you read of?"

"Lucifer," answered the boy--"ambitious as Lucifer."

"Well, don't spill the water, my kingling," said the hunter
good-naturedly. "Life's not so strange as is the way folk look at it.
You and I, now,--we're different! What I care for is just every common
day as it comes naturally along, w