When Waitstill's boys and Patty's girls come back to the farm,
they play by Saco Water as their mothers and their fathers did
before them. The paths through the pine woods along the river's
brink are trodden smooth by their restless, wandering feet; their
eager, curious eyes search the waysides for adventure, but their
babble and laughter are oftenest heard from the ruins of an old
house hidden by great trees. The stones of the cellar, all
overgrown with blackberry vines, are still there; and a fragment
of the brick chimney, where swallows build their nests from year
to year. A wilderness of weeds, tall and luxuriant, springs up to
hide the stone over which Jacob Cochrane stepped daily when he
issued from his door; and the polished stick with which
three-year-old Patty beats a tattoo may be a round from the very
chair in which he sat, expounding the Bible according to his own
vision. The thickets of sweet clover and red-tipped grasses, of
waving ferns and young alder bushes hide all of ugliness that
belongs to the deserted spot and serve as a miniature forest in
whose shade the younglings foreshadow the future at their play of
home-building and housekeeping. In a far corner, altogether
concealed from the passer-by, there is a secret treasure, a
wonderful rosebush, its green leaves shining with health and
vigor.
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