“They seem to be scolding us,” I said, laughing.

  “Oh, they are not half such scolds as they sound,” answered Uncle Blair gaily. “If they would but ‘tak a thought and mend’ their shrew-like ways they would be dear, lovable creatures enough.”

  “If I had to be an animal I think I’d like to be a squirrel,” said the Story Girl. “It must be next best thing to flying.”

  “Just see what a spring that fellow gave,” laughed Uncle Blair. “And now listen to his song of triumph! I suppose that chasm he cleared seemed as wide and deep to him as Niagara Gorge would to us if we leaped over it. Well, the wood people are a happy folk and very well satisfied with themselves.”

  Those who have followed a dim, winding, balsamic path to the unexpected hollow where a wood-spring lies have found the rarest secret the forest can reveal. Such was our good fortune that day. At the end of our path we found it, under the pines, a crystal-clear thing with lips unkissed by so much as a stray sunbeam.

  “It is easy to dream that this is one of the haunted springs of old romance,” said Uncle Blair. “’Tis an enchanted spot this, I am very sure, and we should go softly, speaking low, lest we disturb the rest of a white, wet naiad, or break some spell that has cost long years of mystic weaving.”

  “It’s so easy to believe things in the woods,” said the Story Girl, shaping a cup from a bit of golden-brown birch bark and filling it at the spring.

  “Drink a toast in that water, Sara,” said Uncle Blair. “There’s not a doubt that it has some potent quality of magic in it and the wish you wish over it will come true.”

  The Story Girl lifted her golden-hued flagon to her red lips. Her hazel eyes laughed at us over the brim.

  “Here’s to our futures,” she cried, “I wish that every day of our lives may be better than the one that went before.”

  “An extravagant wish — a very wish of youth,” commented Uncle Blair, “and yet in spite of its extravagance, a wish that will come true if you are true to yourselves. In that case, every day WILL be better than all that went before — but there will be many days, dear lad and lass, when you will not believe it.”

  We did not understand him, but we knew Uncle Blair never explained his meaning. When asked it he was wont to answer with a smile, “Some day you’ll grow to it. Wait for that.” So we addressed ourselves to follow the brook that stole away from the spring in its windings and doublings and tricky surprises.

  “A brook,” quoth Uncle Blair, “is the most changeful, bewitching, lovable thing in the world. It is never in the same mind or mood two minutes. Here it is sighing and murmuring as if its heart were broken. But listen — yonder by the birches it is laughing as if it were enjoying some capital joke all by itself.”

  It was indeed a changeful brook; here it would make a pool, dark and brooding and still, where we bent to look at our mirrored faces; then it grew communicative and gossiped shallowly over a broken pebble bed where there was a diamond dance of sunbeams and no troutling or minnow could glide through without being seen. Sometimes its banks were high and steep, hung with slender ashes and birches; again they were mere, low margins, green with delicate mosses, shelving out of the wood. Once it came to a little precipice and flung itself over undauntedly in an indignation of foam, gathering itself up rather dizzily among the mossy stones below. It was some time before it got over its vexation; it went boiling and muttering along, fighting with the rotten logs that lie across it, and making far more fuss than was necessary over every root that interfered with it. We were getting tired of its ill-humour and talked of leaving it, when it suddenly grew sweet-tempered again, swooped around a curve — and presto, we were in fairyland.

  It was a little dell far in the heart of the woods. A row of birches fringed the brook, and each birch seemed more exquisitely graceful and golden than her sisters. The woods receded from it on every hand, leaving it lying in a pool of amber sunshine. The yellow trees were mirrored in the placid stream, with now and then a leaf falling on the water, mayhap to drift away and be used, as Uncle Blair suggested, by some adventurous wood sprite who had it in mind to fare forth to some far-off, legendary region where all the brooks ran into the sea.

  “Oh, what a lovely place!” I exclaimed, looking around me with delight.

  “A spell of eternity is woven over it, surely,” murmured Uncle Blair. “Winter may not touch it, or spring ever revisit it. It should be like this for ever.”

  “Let us never come here again,” said the Story Girl softly, “never, no matter how often we may be in Carlisle. Then we will never see it changed or different. We can always remember it just as we see it now, and it will be like this for ever for us.”

  “I’m going to sketch it,” said Uncle Blair.

  While he sketched it the Story Girl and I sat on the banks of the brook and she told me the story of the Sighing Reed. It was a very simple little story, that of the slender brown reed which grew by the forest pool and always was sad and sighing because it could not utter music like the brook and the birds and the winds. All the bright, beautiful things around it mocked it and laughed at it for its folly. Who would ever look for music in it, a plain, brown, unbeautiful thing? But one day a youth came through the wood; he was as beautiful as the spring; he cut the brown reed and fashioned it according to his liking; and then he put it to his lips and breathed on it; and, oh, the music that floated through the forest! It was so entrancing that everything — brooks and birds and winds — grew silent to listen to it. Never had anything so lovely been heard; it was the music that had for so long been shut up in the soul of the sighing reed and was set free at last through its pain and suffering.

  I had heard the Story Girl tell many a more dramatic tale; but that one stands out for me in memory above them all, partly, perhaps, because of the spot in which she told it, partly because it was the last one I was to hear her tell for many years — the last one she was ever to tell me on the golden road.

  When Uncle Blair had finished his sketch the shafts of sunshine were turning crimson and growing more and more remote; the early autumn twilight was falling over the woods. We left our dell, saying good-bye to it for ever, as the Story Girl had suggested, and we went slowly homeward through the fir woods, where a haunting, indescribable odour stole out to meet us.

  “There is magic in the scent of dying fir,” Uncle Blair was saying aloud to himself, as if forgetting he was not quite alone. “It gets into our blood like some rare, subtly-compounded wine, and thrills us with unutterable sweetnesses, as of recollections from some other fairer life, lived in some happier star. Compared to it, all other scents seem heavy and earth-born, luring to the valleys instead of the heights. But the tang of the fir summons onward and upward to some ‘far-off, divine event’ — some spiritual peak of attainment whence we shall see with unfaltering, unclouded vision the spires of some aerial City Beautiful, or the fulfilment of some fair, fadeless land of promise.”

  He was silent for a moment, then added in a lower tone,

  “Felicity, you loved the scent of dying fir. If you were here tonight with me — Felicity — Felicity!”

  Something in his voice made me suddenly sad. I was comforted when I felt the Story Girl slip her hand into mine. So we walked out of the woods into the autumn dusk.

  We were in a little valley. Half-way up the opposite slope a brush fire was burning clearly and steadily in a maple grove. There was something indescribably alluring in that fire, glowing so redly against the dark background of forest and twilit hill.

  “Let us go to it,” cried Uncle Blair, gaily, casting aside his sorrowful mood and catching our hands. “A wood fire at night has a fascination not to be resisted by those of mortal race. Hasten — we must not lose time.”

  “Oh, it will burn a long time yet,” I gasped, for Uncle Blair was whisking us up the hill at a merciless rate.

  “You can’t be sure. It may have been lighted by some good, honest farmer-man, bent on tidying up his sugar orchard, but it may also, for anything we know, have been kindled by no earthly woodman as a beacon or summons to the tribes of fairyland, and may vanish away if we tarry.”

  It did not vanish and presently we found ourselves in the grove. It was very beautiful; the fire burned with a clear, steady glow and a soft crackle; the long arcades beneath the trees were illuminated with a rosy radiance, beyond which lurked companies of gray and purple shadows. Everything was very still and dreamy and remote.

  “It is impossible that out there, just over the hill, lies a village of men, where tame household lamps are shining,” said Uncle Blair.

  “I feel as if we must be thousands of miles away from everything we’ve ever known,” murmured the Story Girl.

  “So you are!” said Uncle Blair emphatically. “You’re back in the youth of the race — back in the beguilement of the young world. Everything is in this hour — the beauty of classic myths, the primal charm of the silent and the open, the lure of mystery. Why, it’s a time and place when and where everything might come true — when the men in green might creep out to join hands and dance around the fire, or dryads steal from their trees to warm their white limbs, grown chilly in October frosts, by the blaze. I wouldn’t be much surprised if we should see something of the kind. Isn’t that the flash of an ivory shoulder through yonder gloom? And didn’t you see a queer little elfin face peering at us around that twisted gray trunk? But one can’t be sure. Mortal eyesight is too slow and clumsy a thing to match against the flicker of a pixy-litten fire.”

  Hand in hand we wandered through that enchanted place, seeking the folk of elf-land, “and heard their mystic voices calling, from fairy knoll and haunted hill.” Not till the fire died down into ashes did we leave the grove. Then we found that the full moon was gleaming lustrously from a cloudless sky across the valley. Between us and her stretched up a tall pine, wondrously straight and slender and branchless to its very top, where it overflowed in a crest of dark boughs against the silvery splendour behind it. Beyond, the hill farms were lying in a suave, white radiance.

  “Doesn’t it seem a long, long time to you since we left home this afternoon?” asked the Story Girl. “And yet it is only a few hours.”

  Only a few hours — true; yet such hours were worth a cycle of common years untouched by the glory and the dream.

  CHAPTER XXIX.

  WE LOSE A FRIEND

  Our beautiful October was marred by one day of black tragedy — the day Paddy died. For Paddy, after seven years of as happy a life as ever a cat lived, died suddenly — of poison, as was supposed. Where he had wandered in the darkness to meet his doom we did not know, but in the frosty dawnlight he dragged himself home to die. We found him lying on the doorstep when we got up, and it did not need Aunt Janet’s curt announcement, or Uncle Blair’s reluctant shake of the head, to tell us that there was no chance of our pet recovering this time. We felt that nothing could be done. Lard and sulphur on his paws would be of no use, nor would any visit to Peg Bowen avail. We stood around in mournful silence; the Story Girl sat down on the step and took poor Paddy upon her lap.

  “I s’pose there’s no use even in praying now,” said Cecily desperately.

  “It wouldn’t do any harm to try,” sobbed Felicity.

  “You needn’t waste your prayers,” said Dan mournfully, “Pat is beyond human aid. You can tell that by his eyes. Besides, I don’t believe it was the praying cured him last time.”

  “No, it was Peg Bowen,” declared Peter, “but she couldn’t have bewitched him this time for she’s been away for months, nobody knows where.”

  “If he could only TELL us where he feels the worst!” said Cecily piteously. “It’s so dreadful to see him suffering and not be able to do a single thing to help him!”

  “I don’t think he’s suffering much now,” I said comfortingly.

  The Story Girl said nothing. She passed and repassed her long brown hand gently over her pet’s glossy fur. Pat lifted his head and essayed to creep a little nearer to his beloved mistress. The Story Girl drew his limp body close in her arms. There was a plaintive little mew — a long quiver — and Paddy’s friendly soul had fared forth to wherever it is that good cats go.

  “Well, he’s gone,” said Dan, turning his back abruptly to us.

  “It doesn’t seem as if it can be true,” sobbed Cecily. “This time yesterday morning he was full of life.”

  “He drank two full saucers of cream,” moaned Felicity, “and I saw him catch a mouse in the evening. Maybe it was the last one he ever caught.”

  “He did for many a mouse in his day,” said Peter, anxious to pay his tribute to the departed.

  “‘He was a cat — take him for all in all. We shall not look upon his like again,’” quoted Uncle Blair.

  Felicity and Cecily and Sara Ray cried so much that Aunt Janet lost patience completely and told them sharply that they would have something to cry for some day — which did not seem to comfort them much. The Story Girl shed no tears, though the look in her eyes hurt more than weeping.

  “After all, perhaps it’s for the best,” she said drearily. “I’ve been feeling so badly over having to go away and leave Paddy. No matter how kind you’d all be to him I know he’d miss me terribly. He wasn’t like most cats who don’t care who comes and goes as long as they get plenty to eat. Paddy wouldn’t have been contented without me.”

  “Oh, no-o-o, oh, no-o-o,” wailed Sara Ray lugubriously.

  Felix shot a disgusted glance at her.

  “I don’t see what YOU are making such a fuss about,” he said unfeelingly. “He wasn’t your cat.”

  “But I l-l-oved him,” sobbed Sara, “and I always feel bad when my friends d-do.”

  “I wish we could believe that cats went to heaven, like people,” sighed Cecily. “Do you really think it isn’t possible?”

  Uncle Blair shook his head.

  “I’m afraid not. I’d like to think cats have a chance for heaven, but I can’t. There’s nothing heavenly about cats, delightful creatures though they are.”

  “Blair, I’m really surprised to hear the things you say to the children,” said Aunt Janet severely.

  “Surely you wouldn’t prefer me to tell them that cats DO go to heaven,” protested Uncle Blair.

  “I think it’s wicked to carry on about an animal as those children do,” answered Aunt Janet decidedly, “and you shouldn’t encourage them. Here now, children, stop making a fuss. Bury that cat and get off to your apple picking.”

  We had to go to our work, but Paddy was not to be buried in any such off-hand fashion as that. It was agreed that we should bury him in the orchard at sunset that evening, and Sara Ray, who had to go home, declared she would be back for it, and implored us to wait for her if she didn’t come exactly on time.

  “I mayn’t be able to get away till after milking,” she sniffed, “but I don’t want to miss it. Even a cat’s funeral is better than none at all.”

  “Horrid thing!” said Felicity, barely waiting until Sara was out of earshot.

  We worked with heavy hearts that day; the girls cried bitterly most of the time and we boys whistled defiantly. But as evening drew on we began to feel a sneaking interest in the details of the funeral. As Dan said, the thing should be done properly, since Paddy was no common cat. The Story Girl selected the spot for the grave, in a little corner behind the cherry copse, where early violets enskied the grass in spring, and we boys dug the grave, making it “soft and narrow,” as the heroine of the old ballad wanted hers made. Sara Ray, who managed to come in time after all, and Felicity stood and watched us, but Cecily and the Story Girl kept far aloof.

  “This time last night you never thought you’d be digging Pat’s grave to-night,” sighed Felicity.

  “We little k-know what a day will bring forth,” sobbed Sara. “I’ve heard the minister say that and it is true.”

  “Of course it’s true. It’s in the Bible; but I don’t think you should repeat it in connection with a cat,” said Felicity dubiously.

  When all was in readiness the Story Girl brought her pet through the orchard where he had so often frisked and prowled. No useless coffin enclosed his breast but he reposed in a neat cardboard box.

  “I wonder if it would be right to say ‘ashes to ashes and dust to dust,’” said Peter.

  “No, it wouldn’t,” averred Felicity. “It would be real wicked.”

  “I think we ought to sing a hymn, anyway,” asseverated Sara Ray.

  “Well, we might do that, if it isn’t a very religious one,” conceded Felicity.

  “How would ‘Pull for the shore, sailor, pull for the shore,’ do?” asked Cecily. “That never seemed to me a very religious hymn.”

  “But it doesn’t seem very appropriate to a funeral occasion either,” said Felicity.

  “I think ‘Lead, kindly light,’ would be ever so much more suitable,” suggested Sara Ray, “and it is kind of soothing and melancholy too.”

  “We are not going to sing anything,” said the Story Girl coldly. “Do you want to make the affair ridiculous? We will just fill up the grave quietly and put a flat stone over the top.”

  “It isn’t much like my idea of a funeral,” muttered Sara Ray discontentedly.

  “Never mind, we’re going to have a real obituary about him in Our Magazine,” whispered Cecily consolingly.

  “And Peter is going to cut his name on top of the stone,” added Felicity. “Only we mustn’t let on to the grown-ups until it is done, because they might say it wasn’t right.”

  We left the orchard, a sober little band, with the wind of the gray twilight blowing round us. Uncle Roger passed us at the gate.

  “So the last sad obsequies are over?” he remarked with a grin.

  And we hated Uncle Roger. But we loved Uncle Blair because he said quietly,

  “And so you’ve buried your little comrade?”

  So much may depend on the way a thing is said. But not even Uncle Blair’s sympathy could take the sting out of the fact that there was no Paddy to get the froth that night at milking time. Felicity cried bitterly all the time she was straining the milk. Many human beings have gone to their graves unattended by as much real regret as followed that one gray pussy cat to his.

 

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