have told what
it was; nor would he probably have found any one else that shared his
opinion. That frank and genial gaze of Bonnyboy's, which expressed
goodness of heart but nothing else, seemed to Grim an "open sesame"
to all hearts; and that unawakened something which goes so well with
childhood, but not with adult age, filled him with tenderness and a
vague anxiety. "My poor lad," he would murmur to himself, as he caught
sight of Bonnyboy's big perspiring face, with the yellow tuft of hair
hanging down over his forehead, "clever you are not; but you have that
which the cleverest of us often lack."

V.

There were sixteen saw-mills in all, and the one at which Bonnyboy was
employed was the last of the series. They were built on little terraces
on both banks of the river, and every four of them were supplied with
power from an artificial dam, in which the water was stored in time of
drought, and from which it escaped in a mill-race when required for use.
These four dams were built of big stones, earthwork, and lumber,
faced with smooth planks, over which a small quantity of water usually
drizzled into the shallow river-bed. Formerly, before the power was
utilized, this slope had been covered with seething and swirling
rapids--a favorite resort of the salmon, which leaped high in the
spring, and were caught in the box-traps that hung on long beams over
the water. Now the salmon had small chance of shedding their spawn in
the cool, bright mountain pools, for they could not leap the dams, and
if by chance one got into the mill-race, it had a hopeless struggle
against a current that would have carried an elephant off his feet.
Bonnyboy, who more than once had seen the beautiful silvery fish spring
right on to the millwheel, and be flung upon the rocks, had wished that
he had understood the language of the fishes, so that he might tell them
how foolish such proceedings were. But merciful though he was, he had
been much discouraged when, after having put them back into the river,
they had promptly repeated the experiment.

There were about twenty-five or thirty men employed at the mill where
Bonnyboy earned his bread in the sweat of his brow, and he was, on the
whole, on good terms with all of them. They did, to be sure, make fun of
him occasionally; but sometimes he failed to understand it, and at other
times he made clumsy but good-humored attempts to repay their gibes
in kind. They took good care, however, not to