"Oh, pooh!" Norris lapsed sulkily into his usual quiet manner. "Of
course I can write better than I can talk. My thoughts are just slow
enough, I guess, to keep up with a pen."
Dick laughed softly as though he were pleased at things he did not tell.
Madeline, for the first time, gave her real attention to Mr. Norris,
whom she had not hitherto thought worth dwelling on--at least when Dick
was about. Never before had this young man talked about himself.
A silence fell.
"Was that a wood-thrush?" Norris asked, manifestly grasping at a change
of subject.
"I don't know, and I don't intend to know," Madeline cried, with such
unusual viciousness that the two men stared. "Poor birds!" she said.
"I've nothing against them, but I'm in rebellion against the bird fad.
I'm so tired of meeting people and having them start in with a gushing,
'Oh, how-de-do! Only fancy, I have just seen a scarlet tanager!' and you
know they haven't, and they wouldn't care anyway, and their mother may
be dying."
Ellery laughed, and Dick said: "Well, what are you going to do about it?"
"I'm going to invent a fad of my own."
"Let us in on the ground floor."
"If you like. I'm learning the notes of the wind in the tree-tops. It
has such variety! No two trees sound alike. Hear that sharp twitter of
the maples? The oak has a deep sonorous song, and the elm's is as
delicate as itself. I believe I could tell them all with my eyes shut."
"One breeze with infinite manifestations. I suppose our souls twist the
breath of the spirit to our own likenesses in the same way," Ellery
said.
Madeline looked at him and he smiled.
"You're getting poetical, old codger," said Dick. "You must be in love."
Ellery blushed, but Dick went on, oblivious of byplay. "I move that we
celebrate the occasion by a cold collation. Last week, your mother
kindly made inquiries about my tastes that led me to infer that
everything I most affect is stowed away in that comfortable-looking
basket."
So they had supper, and Norris fished a volume of Shelley from his
pocket and read The Cloud, which Dick followed by a really funny story
from a magazine. They fell to talking about their own affairs, which to
the young are the chief interests. It takes years "that bring the
philosophic mind" to make abstractions stimulating. Finally they wafted
homeward under a sky dark at the zenith and becoming paler and paler,
violet, rose, wan white, with a line of intense violet along the
horizon, and, as they sailed, Madeline sang softly as one does in the
immediate presence of nature.
This was one day. On another Dick was full of his adventures of the
week. He was learning to know his St. Etienne in all its phases. He told
them of the lumber mills down by the river, where brawny men, primitive
in aspect, fought with a never-ending stream of logs which came down
with the current and raised themselves like uncanny water-monsters, up a
long incline, finally to meet their death at the hands of machinery that
ripped and snarled and clutched. Who would dream, to look at the great
commonplace piles of boards that lined the riverbank for miles, that
their birth-pangs had been so picturesque?