mountains, which the boy intended some time to follow; for this highway
of warlike forays, of messengers of defiance, along which white maidens
had been led captive to Canada, appealed greatly to his imagination.

The boy lived in these traditions quite as much as in those of the
Revolutionary War into which they invariably glided in his perspective of
history, the redskins and the redcoats being both enemies of his
ancestors. There was the grave of the envied Phineas Arms--that ancient
boy not much older than he--and there were hanging in the kitchen the
musket and powder-horn that his great-grandfather had carried at Bunker
Hill, and did he not know by heart the story of his great-grandmother,
who used to tell his father that she heard when she was a slip of a girl
in Plymouth the cannonading on that awful day when Gage met his
victorious defeat?

In fact, according to his history-book there had been little but wars in
this peaceful nation: the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the incessant
frontier wars with the Indians, the Kansas War, the Mormon War, the War
for the Union. The echoes of the latter had not yet died away. What a
career he might have had if he had not been born so late in the world!
Swinging in this tree-top, with a vivid consciousness of life, of his own
capacity for action, it seemed a pity that he could not follow the drum
and the flag into such contests as he read about so eagerly.

And yet this was only a corner of the boy's imagination. He had many
worlds and he lived in each by turn. There was the world of the Old
Testament, of David and Samson, and of those dim figures in the dawn of
history, called the Patriarchs. There was the world of Julius Caesar and
the Latin grammar, though this was scarcely as real to him as the Old
Testament, which was brought to his notice every Sunday as a necessity of