become famous in song and story, because they would furnish the wood from
which was made the weapon of the bowman. The maple was there with all its
symmetry. There was the elm, the dogged and beautiful tree-thing of
to-day, which so clings to life and nourishes in the midst of unwholesome
city surroundings and makes the human hive so much the better. There were
the pines, the sycamore, the foxwood and dogwood, and lime and laurel and
poplar and elder and willow, and the cherry and crab apple and others of
the fruit-bearing kind, since so developed that they are great factors in
man's subsistence now. It was a time of plenty which was riotous. There
remained, too, a vestige of the animal as well as of the vegetable life
of the remoter ages. There were strange and dangerous creatures which
came sometimes up the river from its inlet into the ocean. Such events
had been matters of interest, not to say of anxiety, to Ab's ancestors.

The baby lying there among the beech leaves tired, finally, of its cooing
and twig-snapping and slept the sleep of dreamless early childhood. He
slept happily and noiselessly, but when he at last awoke his demeanor
showed a change. He had nothing to distract him, unless it might be the
breaking of twigs again. He had no toys, and, being hungry, he began to
yell. So far as can be learned from early data, babies, when hungry, have
always yelled. And, of old, as to-day, when a baby yelled, the woman who
had borne it was likely to appear at once upon the scene. Ab's mother
came running lightly from the river bank toward where the youngster lay.
She was worthy of attention as she ran, and this is but a bungling
attempt at a description of her and of her dress.

It should be explained here, with much care and caution, that the mother
of Ab moved in the best and most exclusive circles of the time. She
belonged to the aristocracy and, it may be added, regarding this fine
lady personally, that she had the weakness of paying much attention to