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There's Pippins and Cheese to Come by Charles S. Brooks
page 33 of 106 (31%)
on the stones. The uproar of its former flood was marked upon the shale and
trunks of trees here and there were wedged, but now the river plays drowsy
tunes upon the stones. There is scarcely enough movement of water to flick
the sunlight. A leaf on its idle current is a lazy craft whose skipper
nods. There were hickory trees on the point above. May-apples grew in the
deep woods, and blackberries along the fences. And in the season sober
horses plowed up and down the fields with nodding heads, affirming their
belief in the goodness of the soil and their willingness to help in its
fruition.

Yet the very core of this valley in days past was a certain depth of water
at a turn of the stream. There was a clay bank above it and on it small
naked boys stood and daubed themselves. One of them put a band of clay
about himself by way of decoration. Another, by a more general smudge, made
himself a Hottentot and thereby gave his manners a wider scope and license.
But by daubing yourself entire you became an Indian and might vent yourself
in hideous yells, for it was amazing how the lungs grew stouter when the
clay was laid on thick. Then you tapped your flattened palm rapidly against
your mouth and released an intermittent uproar in order that the valley
might he warned of the deviltry to come. You circled round and round and
beat upon the ground in the likeness of a war dance. But at last, sated
with scalps, off you dived into the pool and came up a white man. Finally,
you stood on one leg and jounced the water from your ear, or pulled a
bloodsucker from your toes before he sapped your life--for this tiny
creature of the rocks was credited with the gift of prodigious inflation,
and might inhale you, blood, sinews, suspenders and all, if left to his
ugly purpose.

Farms should not be too precisely located; at least this is true of farms
which, like my grandfather's, hang in a mist of memory. I read once of a
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