The two visited the corn and cotton fields behind the house, the level swards of the pebbly river, the solemn privetted walks throughout the cemetery. Here generations of dead Jacksonians restfully scattered into the prolific, dusty mother that gave them birth. Pelham learned much on these walks,--the birds, trees, stories of dead heroes, episodes of the war, and the stirring times when the raiders had overrun the village. Grandmother had hidden two brothers, one wounded, for weeks in her cellar, all unknown to the Northern visitors who forced themselves upon her. The boy absorbed indiscriminately the accumulated store of eighty years of active life. After supper, the sweet-faced grandmother would slip a knitted wrap over his shoulders, and walk out with him in the great oak-surrounded square before the house. She taught Pelham how to find the North Star, from the bottom of the Big Dipper; and then the Little Dipper, that had been twisted back until the Milky Way spilled from it. He learned to recognize the big Dragon waddling across the summer heavens, and many of the dwellers in the strange skyey menagerie. These were days and nights of wonder and beauty. He longed to stay here forever, away from the acidity of his father's commands, and the ever-present fear of the belt. But as the autumn came, he wept his farewells and went back. Until his return from that first absence at Jackson, he did not realize how the mountain had claimed him. He maintained a mild, glowing regard for the grandparents' plantation; it was free from the irksome paternal irritations that scarred his home days. But its appeal did not go down to the deepest parts of him. With the mountain it was different. Not merely Hillcrest Cottage, although he felt bound to every board and stone of it; not even merely the Forty Acres, the family name for the fenced, pathed, and parked half of the original eighty on which the house stood; but the whole mountain, its rises and unexpected hollows, and the thicketed valleys that drooped sharply away toward the East,--he responded to all of these. The rest of the Judsons had taken the cottage and the Forty as their home. But this was only a small part of home to the eldest son. The mountain became his castle, his playground, his haven of refuge, the land of his fancy. He was its child, and it was his mother. He got along better with his father that winter. Diligent application to his school work and his tasks at home was the price of liberty on the mountain. Two weekday afternoons, and Sunday after midday dinner, were allowed him. He filled every minute of these respites.