school-master? He was
sorry he hadn't gone. After dinner he started out-doors again. Earth
and sky were radiant with light. Great white tumbling clouds were piled
high all around the horizon--and what a long length of sky it was in
every direction down in the mountains, he had to look straight up,
sometimes, to see the sky at all. Blackbirds chattered in the cedars as
he went to the yard gate. The field outside was full of singing
meadow-larks, and crows were cawing in the woods beyond. There had been
a light shower, and on the dead top of a tall tree he saw a buzzard
stretching his wings out to the sun. Past the edge of the woods, ran a
little stream with banks that were green to the very water's edge, and
Chad followed it on through the woods, over a worn rail-fence, along a
sprouting wheat-field, out into a pasture in which sheep and cattle
were grazing, and on, past a little hill, where, on the next low slope,
sat a great white house with big white pillars, and Chad climbed on top
of the stone fence--and sat, looking. On the portico stood a tall man
in a slouch hat and a lady in black. At the foot of the steps a boy--a
head taller than Chad perhaps--was rigging up a fishing-pole. A negro
boy was leading a black pony toward the porch, and, to his dying day,
Chad never forgot the scene that followed. For, the next moment, a
little figure in a long riding-skirt stood in the big doorway and then
ran down the steps, while a laugh, as joyous as the water running at
his feet, floated down the slope to his ears. He saw the negro stoop,
the little girl bound lightly to her saddle; he saw her black curls
shake in the sunlight, again the merry laugh tinkled in his ears, and
then, with a white plume nodding from her black cap, she galloped off
and disappeared among the trees; and Chad sat looking after
her--thrilled, mysteriously thrilled--mysteriously saddened,
straightway. Would he ever see her again?

The tall man and the lady in black went in-doors, the negro
disappeared, and the boy at the foot of the steps kept on rigging his
pole. Several times voices sounded under the high creek bank below him,
but, quick as his ears were, Chad did not hear them. Suddenly there was
a cry that startled him, and something flashed in the sun over the edge
of the bank and flopped in the grass.

"Snowball!" an imperious young voice called below the bank, "get that
fish!"

On the moment Chad was alert again--somebody was fishing down
the