There was an outlined flower garden in front of the house, made in virgin soil, and with the stumps of trees, close-hewn, still showing above the surface.  Beside the door were what they called “bouncing Betties” and “old hen and chickens,” and on each side of a short pathway, that led to what was as yet little more than a trail through the wood, were bunches of larkspur and phlox and old-fashioned pinks and asters, and there were a few tall hollyhocks and sunflowers standing about as sentinels.  The wild flowers all about were so close to these that all their perfumes blended, and the phlox and pinks could see their own cousins but a few feet away.  The short path ran through a clump of bushes but a few yards from the creek.  In these bushes song-sparrows and “chippy-birds” built their nests.

In the doorway of the little house by the forests edge stood, one afternoon in summer, a young man.  He was what might perhaps be termed an exceedingly young man, as his sixth birthday was but lately attained, and his stature and general appearance did not contradict his age.  His apparel was not, strictly speaking, in keeping with the glory of the general scene.  His hat had been originally of the quality known as “chip,” but the rim was gone, and what remained had an air of abandon about it.  His clothing consisted of two garments, a striped, hickory shirt and trousers of blue drilling.  The trousers were supported by suspenders, home-made, of the same material.  Sometimes he wore but one.  It saved trouble.  He was barefooted.  He stood with a hand in each pocket, his short legs rather wide apart, and looked out upon the landscape.  His air was that of a large landed proprietor, one, for instance, who owned the earth.

This young man under consideration had not been in society to any great extent, and of one world had seen very little.  Of another he knew a great deal, for his age.  With people of the sort who live in towns he was unacquainted, but with nature’s people he was on closer terms.  He had a great friend and crony in a person who had been a teacher, and who had come to this frontier life from a broader field.  This person was his mother.  With his father he was also on a relationship of familiarity, but the father was, necessarily, out with his axe most of the time, and so it came that the young man and his mother were more literally growing up together with the country.  To her he went with such problems as his great mind failed to solve, and he had come to have a very good opinion of her indeed.  Not that she was as wise as he in many things; certainly not.  She did not know how the new woodchuck hole was progressing, nor where the coon tracks were thickest along the creek, nor where the woodpecker was nesting; but she was excessively learned, nevertheless, and could be relied upon in an emergency.  He approved of her, decidedly.  Besides, he remembered her course on one occasion when he was in a great strait.  He was but three years old then, but he remembered all about it.  It was, in fact, this occurrence which had given him his hobby.