Once Amy
came to the door, but only for a moment, when she called the shouting
youngsters from their short recess. Then recrossing the valley half
a mile above, he walked slowly home to dinner along the road leading
past the building. How he envied the boys and girls whose droning
voices reached his ears through the open windows.
While Dick was chatting with his kind host after dinner, as they sat
on the porch facing the great oak, the latter talked about the spring
and the history of the place; how it used to be a favorite camping
ground for the Indians in winter; and pointed out the field below the
barn, where they had found arrowheads by the hundreds. Then he told
of the other spring just over the ridge, and how the two streams came
together and flowed on, larger and larger, to the river. And then with
a farmer's fondness for a harmless jest, he suggested that Dick might
find it worth his while to visit the other spring; "for," said he "the
school-marm lives there; and she's a right pretty girl. Sensible too,
I reckon, though she aint been here only since the first of September."
When the farmer had gone to his work, Dick walked down to the
spring-house, and sitting on the twisted roots of the old oak, looked
into the crystal water.
"And so Amy lives by a spring just like this," he thought, "and often
sits beneath that other oak, perhaps, looking into the water as I am
looking now."
A blue-jay, perched on a bough above, screamed in mocking laughter at
the dreamer beneath; an old drake, leading his family in a waddling
row to the open stream below the little house, solemnly quacked his
protest against such a willful waste of time; and a spotted calf thrust
its head through the barn-yard fence to gaze at him in mild reproach.
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