er two years ago, but I was too busy to write it down. Besides, I
didn't know there would be such things to write. The boy knows me a
little now. He comes up oftener. His mother brings him. She is very
sweet and gentle, but she will not leave him alone with me because I am
queer and she is afraid I may teach him to be queer. She does not
understand. She wouldn't if I told her. She takes things as they are.
There are no questions in her mind. There will be in the boy's. They
have begun to come. I can see them more than ever by the look in his
eyes. Several years ago, about when I finished writing in this book, I
saw I should have to give up questioning myself and calling on God.
There were no answers. If there were, He didn't mean to let me have
them. I mustn't keep on. It was dangerous. I got no good out of it and I
should come to harm. And if I had got to live, I must be as near like
other folks as I could. So I must be as busy as I could. And it came to
me that over beyond the mountain there were folks poorer than I am, and
that knew less, a good deal less. I didn't know anything about God, but
I did know I must keep clean and eat the right food. So I begun to take
long tramps round the countryside, and wherever I went I'd try to find
out the sick and, if the family was poor, work for them a while and sit
up with the sick one, and, if he was discouraged, try to help him
through.

"So it happened I was away from the hut a good deal of the time, and I
got an idea the Ravens liked that. It must have touched their pride to
have Old Crow living up here alone, queer as Dick's hat-band. Whichever
way I fixed it, I was a kind of a curse: for when I went off on my
wanderings I was a tramp and the news of it came back home, and I often
think the boy's mother was sorry and wished I wouldn't, though even that
was better than my being around, toleing off the boy. I liked my
wanderings, in summer best of all. But in winter the folks needed me
more, shut up so in tight houses, catching colds in bad air, and it got
so when they were sick they'd send for me and I was proper pleased to
go. And they came to have a kind of a trust in me, and I was nearer
being contented than I'd been in my whole life. Because the questions
didn't come hardly at all, now. I was too busy by day and too tired at
night. So it went on till one day I came to old Billy Jones's little
house, where he lived all alone in the dirt and filth. It was just at
the foot