Halfway up the mountain-side, overlooking a ravine, through which a streamlet flowed to the lake, stood a woodman’s cottage.  In the room on which the front door opened were two persons—­an infant in a wooden cradle, in the corner between the fire-place and the window; and, seated on a stool in the flood of sunlight that streamed through the doorway, an old man.  His lips were moving slightly, and his face had the look of one whose thoughts were far away.  On the patch of floor in front of him lay cross-bars of sunlight, which flowed in through the casement window.  The sky overhead was cloudless, while the murky belt on the horizon was not visible from the cottage door.  In the windless calm no leaf seemed to stir in the forest around.  The cottage clock in the corner ticked the passing moments; the wild cry of the “curry fowl” was heard now and again from the lake; there was no other sound in the summer afternoon, and the deep heart of nature seemed at rest.

The old man’s eyes rested on the bars of sunlight, but he saw another scene.  On his face, in which the simplicity of childhood seemed to have reappeared, was a knowing, amused look, expressing infinite relish of some inward thought, the simple essence of mischief.  Bars of sunlight, just like those, used to lie on the schoolroom floor when he was a little boy, and was sent to Dame Gartney’s school to be kept out of harm’s way, and to learn what he might.  He saw himself, an urchin of five or six years, seated on a stool beside the Dame’s great arm-chair.  She was slowly, with dim eyes, threading a needle for the tiny maiden standing before her, clutching in her hot little hand the unhemmed duster on which she was to learn to sew.  The thread approached the needle’s eye; it was nearly in, when the arm-chair gave a very little shake, apparently of its own accord; the old lady missed her aim, and the needle and the thread were as far apart as ever, while the small imp sitting quiet at her side was unsuspected.  Not once nor twice only was this little game successfully played.  It used to enliven the hot, sleepy afternoon, while the bars of light were crawling slowly—­oh! so slowly—­across the floor.  He knew school would be over when the outer edge of sunlight touched the corner of the box-bed against the wall, where the little girl that lived there and called the dame “Granny” was put to sleep of a night.

His school experience was short, consisting, indeed, of but six bright summer weeks, after which it had become his business to mind the baby, while his mother went out to work.  But the most vivid of the impressions of his childhood were connected with that brief school career.  Distinct above the rest stood out the memory of one afternoon, when sitting on his low stool he had seen dark smudges of shadow come straying, curling, whirling across the squares of sunlight; when shouts had arisen in the yard, and just as the dame had made Effie May hold out her hand for dropping her thimble