in school and was his gentle comrade morning and evening along the
river road where grew the sweet-flag and the snap-dragon and the barberry
bush; to make friends with the elegant gray squirrel and the lively red
squirrel and the comical chipmunk, who were not much afraid of this
unarmed naturalist. They may have recognized their kinship to him,
for he could climb like any squirrel, and not one of them could have
clung more securely to this bough where he was swinging, rejoicing in the
strength of his lithe, compact little body. When he shouted in pure
enjoyment of life, they chattered in reply, and eyed him with a primeval
curiosity that had no fear in it. This lad in short trousers, torn
shirt, and a frayed straw hat above his mobile and cheerful face, might
be only another sort of animal, a lover like themselves of the beech-nut
and the hickory-nut.

It was a gay world up here among the tossing branches. Across the river,
on the first terrace of the hill, were weather-beaten farmhouses, amid
apple orchards and cornfields. Above these rose the wooded dome of Mount
Peak, a thousand feet above the river, and beyond that to the left the
road wound up, through the scriptural land of Bozrah, to high and
lonesome towns on a plateau stretching to unknown regions in the south.
There was no bar to the imagination in that direction. What a gracious
valley, what graceful slopes, what a mass of color bathing this lovely
summer landscape! Down from the west, through hills that crowded on
either side to divert it from its course, ran the sparkling Deerfield,
from among the springs and trout streams of the Hoosac, merrily going on
to the great Connecticut. Along the stream was the ancient highway, or
lowway, where in days before the railway came the stage-coach and the big
transport-wagons used to sway and rattle along on their adventurous
voyage from the gate of the Sea at Boston to the gate of the West at
Albany.

Below, where the river spread wide among the rocks in shallows, or eddies
in deep, dark pools, was the ancient, long, covered, wooden bridge,
striding diagonally from rock to rock on stone columns, a dusky tunnel
through the air, a passage of gloom flecked with glints of sunlight, that
struggled in crosscurrents through the interstices of the boards, and set
dancing the motes and the dust in a golden haze, a stuffy passage with
odors a century old--who does not know the pungent smell of an old
bridge?--a structure that