at crowned his head and canted with the
wind and flopped about his neck, and would have sailed away down many a
mountain brook but for a faithful leather strap that lay buried in the
half-moon whiskers and held on for dear life. And from under the rim of
this thatch, and half hidden in the matted masses of badly adjusted hair,
was a thin, peaked nose, bridged by a pair of big spectacles, and
somewhere below these, again, a pitfall of a mouth covered with twigs of
hair and an underbrush of beard, while deep-set in the whole tangle, like
still pools reflecting the blue and white of the sweet heavens above, lay
his eyes,--eyes that won you, kindly, twinkling, merry, trustful, and
trusting eyes. Beneath these pools of light, way down below, way down
where his heart beat warm, lived Jonathan.

I know a fruit in Mexico, delicious in flavor, called Timburici, covered
by a skin as rough and hairy as a cocoanut; and a flower that bristles
with thorns before it blooms into waxen beauty; and there are agates
encrusted with clay and pearls that lie hidden in oysters. All these
things, somehow, remind me of Jonathan.

His cabin was the last bit of shingle and brick chimney on that side of
the Franconia Notch. There were others, farther on in the forest, with
bark slants for shelter, and forked sticks for swinging kettles; but
civilization ended with Jonathan's store-stove and the square of oil-cloth
that covered his sitting-room floor. Upstairs, under the rafters, there
was a guest-chamber smelling of pine boards and drying herbs, and
sheltering a bed gridironed with bed-cord and softened by a thin layer of
feathers encased in a ticking and covered with a cotton quilt. This bed
always made a deep impression upon me mentally and bodily. Mentally,
because I always slept so soundly in it whenever I visited
Jonathan,--even with the rain pattering on the roof and the wind soughing
through the big pine-trees; and bodily, because--well, because of the
cords. Beside this bed was a chair for my candle, and on the floor a small
square plank, laid loosely over the stovepipe hole which, in winter, held
the pipe.

In summer mornings Jonathan made an alarm clock of this plank, flopping it
about with the end of a fishing-rod poked up from below, never stopping
until he saw my sleepy face peering down into his own. There was no
bureau, only a nail or so in the scantling, and no washstand, of course;
the tin basin at the well outside was better.