hands clasping the old man's ears, they had gone up the abandoned
skid-road and into the semi-darkness of the forest, terminating
suddenly in a shower of sunshine that fell in an open space where a
boy could roll and play and never get dirty. Also there were several
dozen gray squirrels there waiting to climb on his shoulder and
search his pockets for pine-nuts, a supply of which his father always
furnished.

Bryce always looked forward with eagerness to those frequent trips
with his father "to the place where Mother dear went to heaven." From
his perch on his father's shoulders he could look vast distances into
the underbrush and catch glimpses of the wild life therein; when the
last nut had been distributed to the squirrels in the clearing, he
would follow a flash of blue that was a jay high up among the
evergreen branches, or a flash of red that was a woodpecker hammering
a home in the bark of a sugar-pine. Eventually, however, the spell of
the forest would creep over the child; intuitively he would become
one with the all-pervading silence, climb into his father's arms as
the latter sat dreaming on the old sugar-pine windfall, and presently
drop off to sleep.

When Bryce was six years old, his father sent him to the public
school in Sequoia with the children of his loggers and mill-hands,
thus laying the foundation for a democratic education all too
infrequent with the sons of men rated as millionaires. At night old
Cardigan (for so men had now commenced to designate him!) would hear
his boy's lessons, taking the while an immeasurable delight in
watching the lad's mind develop. As a pupil Bryce was not meteoric;
he had his father's patient, unexcitable nature; and, like the old
man, he possessed the glorious gift of imagination. Never mediocre,