“I do not know.  I tried in vain to run it down in the dictionaries.  In Canada it is known as ‘L’ete de St. Martin.’”

“It seems,” said John, “as if the decay of the year had ceased, in pity.  It is so beautiful and so new to me.  I feel sometimes when I am alone in these woods as if something was going to happen.  Did you ever feel that, sir?”

Rivers was silent for a moment.  The lad’s power to state things in speech and his incapacity to put his thoughts in writing had often puzzled the tutor.  “Why don’t you put such reflections into verse, John?  It’s good practice in English.”

“I can’t—­I’ve tried.”

“Try again.”

“No,” said John decidedly.  “Do look at those maples, Mr. Rivers—­and the oaks—­and the variety of colour in the sassafras.  Did you ever notice how its leaves differ in shape?”

“I never did, but nothing is exactly the same as anything else.  We talked of that once.”

“Then since the world began there never was another me or Leila?”

“Never.  There is only one of anything.”

John was silent—­in thought of his unresemblance to any other John.  “But I am like Uncle Jim!  Aunt says so.”

“Yes, outwardly you are; but you have what he has not—­imagination.  It is both friend and foe as may be.  It may not be a good gift for a soldier—­at least one form of it.  It may be the parent of fear—­of indecisions.”

“But, Mr. Rivers, may it not work also for good and suggest possibilities—­let you into seeing what other men may do?”

The reflection seemed to Rivers not like the thought of so young a man.  He returned, “But I said it might be a friend and have practical uses in life.  I have not found it that myself.  But some men have morbid imagination.  Let us walk.”  They went on again through the quiet splendour of the woodlands.

“Uncle Jim is going away after the election.”

“Yes.”

“He will see Leila.  Don’t you miss her?”

“Yes, but not as you do.  However, she will grow up and go by you and be a woman while you are more slowly maturing.  That is their way.  And then she will marry.”

“Good gracious!  Leila marry!”

“Yes—­it is a way they have.  Let us go home.”

John was disinclined to talk.  Marry—­yes—­when I am older, I shall ask her until she does!

November came in churlish humour and raged in storms of wind and rain, until before their time to let fall their leaves the woods were stripped of their gay colours.  On the fourth day of November the Squire voted the Fremont electoral ticket, and understood that with the exception of Swallow and Pole, Westways had followed the master of Grey Pine.  The other candidates did not trouble them.  The sad case of Josiah and the threat to capture their barber had lost Buchanan the twenty-seven votes of the little town.  Mr. Boynton, the carpenter, fastening the last shingles on the chapel roof remarked to a workman that it was an awful pity Josiah couldn’t know about it and that the new barber wasn’t up to shaving a real stiff beard.