The
roses, though, had always been a joy to him, and had played such a
part in his early days that he had transplanted some of the old bush
to a spot near his doorsteps at Slabsides. Once when he sent me
some of the roses he wrote of them thus: "The roses of my boyhood!
Take the first barefooted country lad you see with homemade linen
trousers and shirt, and ragged straw hat, and put some of these
roses in his hand, and you see me as I was fifty-five years ago.
They are the identical roses, mind you. Sometime I will show you
the bush in the old pasture where they grew."
One day we followed the course he and his brothers and sisters used
to take on their way to school. Leaving the highway near the old
graveyard, we went down across a meadow, then through a beech wood,
and on through the pastures in the valley along which a trout brook
used to flow, on across more meadows and past where a neglected
orchard was, till we came to where the little old schoolhouse
itself stood.
How these trout streams used to lure him to play hookey! All the
summer noonings, too, were spent there. He spoke feelingly of the
one that coursed through the hemlocks--"loitering, log-impeded,
losing itself in the dusky, fragrant depths of the hemlocks." They
used to play hookey down at Stratton Falls, too, and get the green
streaks in the old red sandstone rocks to make slate pencils of,
trying them on their teeth to make sure they were soft enough not
to scratch their slates.
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