on Sundays, after the snow-water had left the creek, and the danger of
lurking colds had been coaxed from the earth by the May sun. Here he would
sit for hours on one of the stones in the great Druid-like circle which
some dead generation of savages had toiled to construct. Sometimes I
would scour the steep sides of the ravine and the moist bottom for curious
plants to fetch to him, and he would tell me of their structure and
design. More often I would sit at his feet, and he, between whiffs at his
pipe, would discourse to me of the differences between his Old World and
this new one, into which I providentially had been born. He talked of his
past, of my future, and together with this was put forth an indescribable
wealth of reminiscence, reflection, and helpful anecdote.

On this spot, with the gaunt outlines of mammoth primeval trunks and
twisted boughs above us, with the sacred memorials of extinct rites about
us, and with the waters crashing down through the solitude beneath us on
their way to turn Sir William's mill-wheel, one could get broad,
comprehensive ideas of what things really meant. One could see wherein the
age of Pitt differed from and advanced upon the age of Colbert, on this
new continent, and could as in prophecy dream of the age of Jefferson yet
to come. Did I as a lad feel these things? Truly it seems to me that
I did.

Half a century before, the medicine-man's fire had blazed in this circle,
its smoky incense crackling upward in offering to the gods of the pagan
tribe. Here, too, upon this charred, barren spot, had been heaped the
blazing fagots about the limbs of the captive brave, and the victim bound
to the stake had nerved himself to show the encircling brutes that not
even the horrors of this death could shake his will, or wring a groan
from his heaving breast. Here, too, above the unending din of the
waterfall and the whisper of these hemlocks overhead, had often risen some