the boy," Old Crow began, in
the neat-handed script. "He is a good little boy. He looks like me at
his age. I had a kind of innocence. He has it, too. If he should grow up
anything like me, I want him to have this letter"--the last word was
crossed out and a more formal one substituted--"statement. If he thinks
about things anyways different from what the neighbors do, they will
begin to laugh at him, and try to make him believe he is not in his
right mind."

Over and over, through the first pages of the book, there were
grammatical lapses when Old Crow, apparently from earnestness of
feeling, fell into colloquial speech. This was always when he got so
absorbed in his subject that he lacked the patience to go back and
rewrite according to rules he certainly knew but which had ceased to
govern his daily intercourse.

"He must remember he may be in his right mind, for all that. If one man
thinks a thing, it might be true if forty thousand men think different.
The first man that thought the earth was round, when everybody else
thought it was flat, was one man. The boy will be told I was crazy. He
will be told I was love-cracked. I did want Selina James. She was a
sweet, pretty girl and high-headed, and the things some folks thought of
her were not so. But she was the kind that takes the world as it was
made and asks no questions, and when I couldn't take it so and tried to
explain to her how I felt about it, she didn't know any way but to
laugh. Perhaps she was afraid. And she did get sick of me and turned me
off. She married and went away. I was glad she went away, because it is
very hard to keep seeing anybody you thought liked you and find they
didn't, after all. It keeps reminding you. It was after that time I
built me the hut and came up here to live.

"Now the boy will hear it was on account of Selina James that I came up
here, but it is not so, though it well might have been. It was about
that time I began to understand what a hard time 'most everybody is
having--except for a little while when they are young, and sometimes
then--and I couldn't stand it. And I thought how it might not be so if
everybody would turn to and help everybody else, and that might be the
kingdom of heaven, the same as we read about it. And then one day I went
out--I was always going round the fields and woods, kind of still,
because I liked to come on little animals living their own lives in
their own way--and I came to the open spot up a