_Atlantic Monthly_, while the boy cleared out a spring that bubbled
from beneath a rock in the shade, and after running for a few feet
sank under a great stone and did not appear again. As the mother read,
the afternoon waned, and when she looked up, she was astonished to see
John standing beside the rock, waist deep in a hole, trying to back
down into it. His face was covered with dirt, and his clothes were wet
from the falling water of the spring that was flowing into the hole he
had opened. In a jiffy she pulled him out, and looking into the hole,
saw by the failing sunlight which shone directly into the place that
the child had uncovered the opening of a cave. But they did not
explore it, for the mother was afraid, and the two came down the hill,
the child's head full of visions of a pirate's treasure, and the
mother's full of the whims of the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.

The next day school began in Sycamore Ridge,--for the school and the
church came with the newspaper, _Freedom's Banner_,--and a new world
opened to the boy, and he forgot the cave, and became interested in
Webster's blue-backed speller. And thus another grown-up person, "Miss
Lucy," came into his world. For with children, men and women
generically are of another order of beings. But Miss Lucy, being John
Barclay's teacher, grew into his daily life on an equality with his
dog and the Hendricks boys, and took a place somewhat lower than his
mother in his list of saints. For Miss Lucy came from Sangamon County,
Illinois, and her father had fought the Indians, and she told the
school as many strange and wonderful things about Illinois as John had
learned from his mother about Haverhill. But his allegiance to the
teacher was only lip service. For at night when he sat digging the
gravel and dirt from the holes in the heels of his copper-toed boots,
that he might wad them with paper to be ready for his skates on the
morrow, or when he sat by the wide fireplace oiling the runners with