Several miles outside the city as it then was, and still beyond its clutches, the country was cut by a winding river bottom with sharp edges of shale.  Down this valley Rocky River came brawling in the spring, over-fed and quarrelsome.  Later in the year—­its youthful appetite having caught an indigestion—­it shrunk and wasted to a shadow.  By August you could cross it on the stones.  The uproar of its former flood was marked upon the shale and trunks of trees here and there were wedged, but now the river plays drowsy tunes upon the stones.  There is scarcely enough movement of water to flick the sunlight.  A leaf on its idle current is a lazy craft whose skipper nods.  There were hickory trees on the point above.  May-apples grew in the deep woods, and blackberries along the fences.  And in the season sober horses plowed up and down the fields with nodding heads, affirming their belief in the goodness of the soil and their willingness to help in its fruition.

Yet the very core of this valley in days past was a certain depth of water at a turn of the stream.  There was a clay bank above it and on it small naked boys stood and daubed themselves.  One of them put a band of clay about himself by way of decoration.  Another, by a more general smudge, made himself a Hottentot and thereby gave his manners a wider scope and license.  But by daubing yourself entire you became an Indian and might vent yourself in hideous yells, for it was amazing how the lungs grew stouter when the clay was laid on thick.  Then you tapped your flattened palm rapidly against your mouth and released an intermittent uproar in order that the valley might he warned of the deviltry to come.  You circled round and round and beat upon the ground in the likeness of a war dance.  But at last, sated with scalps, off you dived into the pool and came up a white man.  Finally, you stood on one leg and jounced the water from your ear, or pulled a bloodsucker from your toes before he sapped your life—­for this tiny creature of the rocks was credited with the gift of prodigious inflation, and might inhale you, blood, sinews, suspenders and all, if left to his ugly purpose.

Farms should not be too precisely located; at least this is true of farms which, like my grandfather’s, hang in a mist of memory.  I read once of a wonderful spot—­quite inferior, doubtless, to my grandfather’s farm—­which was located by evil directions intentionally to throw a seeker off.  Munchausen, you will recall, in the placing of his magic countries, was not above this agreeable villainy.  Robinson Crusoe was loose and vague in the placing of his island.  It is said that Izaak Walton waved a hand obscurely toward the stream where he had made a catch, but could not be cornered to a nice direction, lest his pool be overrun.  In early youth, I myself went, on a mischievous hint, to explore a remote region which I was told lay in the dark behind the kindling pile.  But because I moved in a fearful darkness, quite beyond the pale light from the furnace room, I lost the path.  It did not lead me to the peaks and the roaring waters.