would bring him a cluster of wild honeysuckles, azaleas, or the
painted blossoms of Las Mariposas. The men had suddenly awakened to
the fact that there were beauty and significance in these trifles,
which they had so long trodden carelessly beneath their feet. A flake
of glittering mica, a fragment of variegated quartz, a bright pebble
from the bed of the creek, became beautiful to eyes thus cleared and
strengthened, and were invariably put aside for The Luck. It was
wonderful how many treasures the woods and hillsides yielded that
"would do for Tommy." Surrounded by playthings such as never child out
of fairyland had before, it is to be hoped that Tommy was content. He
appeared to be serenely happy, albeit there was an infantine gravity
about him, a contemplative light in his round gray eyes, that sometimes
worried Stumpy. He was always tractable and quiet, and it is recorded
that once, having crept beyond his "corral,"--a hedge of tessellated
pine boughs, which surrounded his bed,--he dropped over the bank on his
head in the soft earth, and remained with his mottled legs in the air
in that position for at least five minutes with unflinching gravity.
He was extricated without a murmur. I hesitate to record the many
other instances of his sagacity, which rest, unfortunately, upon the
statements of prejudiced friends. Some of them were not without a
tinge of superstition. "I crep' up the bank just now," said Kentuck
one day, in a breathless state of excitement, "and dern my skin if he
wasn't a-talking to a jaybird as was a-sittin' on his lap. There they
was, just as free and sociable as anything you please, a-jawin' at
each other just like two cherrybums." Howbeit, whether creeping over
the pine boughs or lying lazily on his back blinking at the leaves
above him, to him the birds sang, the squirrels chattered, and the
flowers bloomed. Nature was his nurse and playfellow. For him she
would let slip between the leaves golden shafts of sunlight that fell
just within his grasp; she would send wandering breezes to visit him