It was the old struggle, though he did not know it--the voice of the wilderness striving against the voice of the home ties. This time the voice of the home ties sang in triumph at thought of Stephanie; but there comes a time occasionally in a man's life when his mother the woman may mean less to him for a space than his mother the earth. But with Dick the crisis had not yet come; and he scrambled to his feet very contentedly, and proceeded to a little marsh close at hand, where all sorts of fair swamp plants grew--feathery green things, and jewelled touch-me-not, and jacks-in-the-pulpit, and long-stemmed violets in season. For the tiny canoe was to be filled with little ferns and soft mosses as a gift for Stephanie, and that thought of the fairy river was forgotten. This important business attended to, he turned slowly and reluctantly towards home. But the woods were full of sights and sounds that appealed to every half-awakened instinct in the boy's soul. A small, brown, hawk-faced owl lay stupidly at the mouth of a sort of tunnel it had made for itself in the long, bleached grasses. So perfectly did it resemble a piece of decayed and mottled wood that even Dick's keen eye almost passed it over, until it sprang up from this cosy day-time retreat, and blundered away among the trees. Dragon-flies, unlike their brethren of the earlier year, in that they were clad in crimson and russet plush, and not in green and pink and sapphire mail, took their flashing flights among the faded undergrowth. The air was warm and golden still, but a keen nose might detect in it a threatening of frost; and the fallen leaves yielded a delicate fragrance as of damp earth and new mown hay.