had come to know the
pleasure of real companionship, and looked back to the old days wondering
how I had endured them, and with dread to those that seemed to lie ahead.
Penelope was a girl, to be sure, but she was not like the insipid
creatures of the village who were held in such contempt by boys of my
age. Where I dared to go she followed. Did I climb to the highest
girder in the barn and balance myself on the dizzy height, she was with
me. Did I venture to run the wildest rapids of the creek in the clumsy
box which I called my canoe, she trusted her newest frock and ribbons to
my seamanship. And better than all was the respect and admiration in
which she held me. To her I was no longer the frightened, shivering boy
of the mountain brook. I was in a land I knew and followed its familiar
ways without fear. One day she saw me tumble from the bridge into the
deep swimming-hole, and while she cried out in fright I swam nonchalantly
ashore, a full dozen strokes, and as I dried myself in the sun I reproved
her for her little faith in me. On another I presented her to old Jerry
Schimmel, sitting, a brown, dishevelled heap on his cobbler's bench, and
from my accustomed seat by his stove, in a voice cast into the echoing
hollows of my chest, I commanded him to tell us how he had fought in the
battle of Gettysburg. From my familiarity with the stirring incidents of
the fight as Jerry described them, Penelope thought that I must have had
a part in it too, and my modest disclaimer hardly convinced her that I
had not been a companion-in-arms of this battle-worn veteran.

What days those were! Even the fear that my father would find the
missing Professor grew less. They drifted into weeks, and weeks into
months, and there was no sign of the fugitive. I found myself looking
into the future as though in the quiet evening I were turning my eyes
over the valley to the west and the golden clouds hovering there. I
dealt only with results. I crossed mountains without climbing them, and
always Penelope shared my glory with me. I look back now smiling at that
boyish self-reliance. Mountains have been crossed, but with what
heart-breaking struggles? Battles have been won, but with what a toll of
suffering?

As I recall the day when I first came face to face with real trouble,
with a trouble that leaves in the heart a never-healing wound, it was the
brightest of all that summer. It was one of those days when there was
not