The little Barbour cousins spent Thanksgiving week with the children.
Pelham showed them all the treasured spots on the mountain. To them,
even the walk up the hill was an adventure, as they explored the long
sloping dummyline road, through stiff palisades of golden rod and
Flora's paint-brush, the stalks silver-dusty from the nipping November
winds, and ready to scatter at the tentative poking of a rotting stick,
or the breath of a skimmed stone.
One wonderful picnic they had to Shadow Creek, before the relatives
returned home. All drove over in a wagon to the deserted mill dam, Aunt
Sarah, grumbling her good-humored threats to return to Jackson and leave
"dis mountain foolishness," riding along to mind the children. Jimmy
learned the first few swimming strokes in the cool, brownish pond;
Pelham and the older girls had long been going in regularly with their
father, and were fast becoming expert.
A baby came in April,--another boy, named Edward after Mary's father.
This kept the mother from joining their rambles, so it was necessary for
Pelham to devise the games without her resourceful assistance.
Here the boy's impelling imagination, added to his knowledge of fairy
stories, came to his aid. All the myth-creating urge of the past moved
in him. He peopled the varied crests and valleys with these volatile
companions, visible only in the dusk out of the corner of a friendly
eye. The V-shaped slope from the gap to the railroad was Dwarfland;
Hollis was their prince. Crenshaw Hill, clear to the Locust Hedge, was
Yellow Fairyland; a chum, Lane Cullom, a year older than Pelham, assumed
leadership over these beings. Black-haired Nell, when she could be got
to play, was the princess of the Black Fairies, whose haunts were in the
outcrop before Hillcrest Cottage. Sue was anything needed to complete
the story,--a mere mortal, the queen of the moon-fairies, or of the rock
gnomes. Pelham, himself, in crimson outing flannel cloak, was the king
and lord of the Red Fairies. They were the real spirits of the mountain,
and of fire, and came in their red chariots down the flaming lanes of
the sunset sky, to battle for their dispossessed heritage against all
the forces of night and darkness.
The fights were not all bloodless. On one of these assaults, as he
charged with brittly reed lances up the precipitous quartz quarry, he
stumbled and drove a stiff bit of stubble into a nostril. It bled
furiously, until his stained handkerchief was the hue of his crimson
mantle. But even the three stitches which the doctor took were only an
incident in the noble warfare.
The endless sieges, ambuscades, tourneys and adventures filled
volumes--literally volumes; for Pelham wrote, on folded tablet paper, a
history of the fairy occupation of the mountain, copiously illustrated
with pencil and crayon. It was one of the regrets of his later years
that this history had disappeared completely; even its details vanished
from his memory.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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