great deal, for his age. With people of the sort who live in towns he
was unacquainted, but with nature's people he was on closer terms. He
had a great friend and crony in a person who had been a teacher, and
who had come to this frontier life from a broader field. This person
was his mother. With his father he was also on a relationship of
familiarity, but the father was, necessarily, out with his axe most of
the time, and so it came that the young man and his mother were more
literally growing up together with the country. To her he went with
such problems as his great mind failed to solve, and he had come to
have a very good opinion of her indeed. Not that she was as wise as he
in many things; certainly not. She did not know how the new woodchuck
hole was progressing, nor where the coon tracks were thickest along the
creek, nor where the woodpecker was nesting; but she was excessively
learned, nevertheless, and could be relied upon in an emergency. He
approved of her, decidedly. Besides, he remembered her course on one
occasion when he was in a great strait. He was but three years old
then, but he remembered all about it. It was, in fact, this occurrence
which had given him his hobby.

The young man had a specialty. He had several specialties, but to one
yielded all the rest. He had an eye to chipmunks, and had made most
inefficient traps for them and hoped some day to catch one, but they
were nothing to speak of. As for the minnows in the creek, had he not
caught one with a dipper once, and had he not almost hit a big pickerel
with a stone? He knew where the liverwort and anemones grew most
thickly in the spring and had gathered fragrant bunches of them daily,
and he knew, too, of a hollow where there had been a snowy sheet of
winter-green blossoms earlier, and where there would soon be an
abundance of red berries such as his mother liked. At beech-nut
gathering, in the season, he admitted no superior. As for the habits