One Christmas Day the river was frozen--a rare event in that genial
latitude, and hearing that wild geese were flying down toward the bay
creeks and coves, the Judge took his gun and a negro and set off,
without waiting for Perry, who was not immediately to be found. An
hour later the boy returned and heard of his father's departure, and
started on horseback to overtake the carriage. He followed the track
beyond the mill and almshouse, and across the heads of several
peninsulas or necks leading into the wide tidal river. A few frosted
persimmons hung yet to their warty branches; the hulls of last
autumn's black walnuts were beneath the spreading boughs; old orchards
of peach-trees where the tints of green and bud smouldered in pink
contrast to the oft-blackened and sapless branches, set off the purple
beads of the haw on the bushes along the lanes. Fish-hawks, flying
across the sky, felt the shadow of the flocks of wild ducks flying
higher; and rabbits crossed the road so boldly in the face of Perry
Whaley, that once a raccoon, limping across a cornfield like a lame
spaniel, turned too and took both barrels of Perry's gun without other
fright or injury than slightly to hurry its pace. As the young man
heard the crows chatter around the corn-shocks and the mocking-bird in
some alder-thicket answer and sauce the catbird's scream, he said to
himself:

"Every thing is attached by an inner chord to something else, and that
other thing, free-hearted, carols or quarrels back--except father to
me. Can I not, too, find something to love me? There is Marion, the
Doctor's daughter, with the chestnut curls falling all round her
neck--she loves me, I know; but until I gain my father's love I cannot
think of woman!"

The pine-trees above his head murmured rather than moaned, as if they