elieve such a thing of
Morton Bassett. And even if I did, Thatcher can't have that book. I owe
it to the woman whose baby I baptized up there in the hills to keep it.
And the woman may be living, too, for all I know. I think of her pretty
often. She was game; wouldn't tell anything. If a man had deceived her
she stood by him. Whatever she was--I know she was not bad, not a bit of
it--the spirit of the hills had entered into her--and those are
cleansing airs up there. I suppose it all made the deeper impression on
me because I was born up there myself. When I strike Adirondacks in
print I put down my book and think a while. It's a picture word. It
brings back my earliest childhood as far as I can remember. I call words
that make pictures that way moose words; they jump up in your memory
like a scared moose in a thicket and crash into the woods like a cavalry
charge. I can remember things that happened when I was three years old:
one day father shot a deer in our cornfield and I recall it perfectly.
The general atmosphere of the old place steals over me yet. The very
thought of the pointed spruces, the feathery tamaracks, all the scents
and sounds of summer, and the long, white winters, does my soul good
now. The old Hebrews understood the effect of landscape on character.
They knew most everything, those old chaps. 'I will lift up mine eyes
unto the hills from whence cometh my help.' Any strength there is in me
dates back to the hills of my youth. I'd like to go back there to die
when the bugle calls."

Mrs. Ware had not yet come in. Ware lighted the lamp and freshened the
fire. While he was doing this, Sylvia moved to a chair by the table and
picked up the book. What Ware had said about the hills of his youth, the
woods, the word tamarack that he had dropped carelessly, touched chords
of memory as lightly as a breeze vibrates a wind harp. Was this merely
her imagination that had been stirred, or was it indeed a recollection?
Often before she had been moved by similar vague memories or longings,
whatever they were. They had come to trouble her girlhood at Montgomery,
when the snow whitened the campus and the wind sang in the trees. She
was grateful that the minister had turned his back. Her hands trembled
as she glanced again at the scribbled fly leaf; and more closely at the
words penciled at the bottom: "Baptized Elizabeth at Harris's." Thatcher
wanted this book to use against Bassett. Bassett was a collector of fine
b