Still more than the woman with her Madonna vision, the man exulted in the child’s rapt industry. With vigilant eye he noted the process of creation. A cat, it seemed; Samuel was carving a cat; no, _the_ cat! Once in a while, as if to refresh a memory perhaps somewhat dimmed by his three years’ stay among mortals, Samuel would glance toward Pharaoh, the great green-eyed old black torn; but mostly his head with its long fair curls was bent over his work. Samuel was not copying a cat; he was rather evolving the cat from the deeps of his inner consciousness. Samuel’s cat was not the lithe and lordly beast of Barye, nor yet the affable companion that Frémiet has given to the world; it was rather a cat of the Egyptians, the mystery of cathood incarnate. And just as Michelangelo knew that an angel slept in his marble block, so Samuel knew that all cathood crouched within a wooden chip. The father, seeing the child’s difficulty in separating the cat-mass from the scrap of board in his tiny hand, would gladly have performed the rude preliminaries. But the boy had drawn back, and clasping the wood to his chest, had said firmly, in his usual way of speaking only the key-words of a situation, “Self do all!” Samuel knew no baby-talk. From his mother and her New England forbears (scholars, theologians, translators, and the like) he had inherited a great fund of words fit to be spoken, and from his father a passion for perfection in all things. He had a natural longing to say things rightly, and so saved his larynx for the essential syllables. The father, well-pleased with that confident “Self do all,” returned to his reading. But Samuel, rather than Fort Sumter, filled his mind that night. An odd-looking creature, one would say, if Samuel should suddenly appear in our modern circle. Yet his oddity was rather in what had been done to him than in what he was. His yellow hair was arranged in seven tight spirals hanging to his shoulders; an eighth spiral made a sort of shining ridgepole on the roof of his head, from the brow backwards. Beyond question, a pretty child, with the delicately brilliant coloring of the Nordic; and his fine strong hands and feet had a definite character of their own. He wore a low-necked, short-sleeved tunic, very voluminous as to its skirt; it was made of thick blue woollen material woven by his grandmother. Beneath the tunic were ridiculous shapeless breeches of the same stuff; then came a section of bare calf, and after that, white wool socks and stout, copper-toed ankle-ties. As he sat on the braided rug, among his blue homespun billows, his back against his adoring slave, the sheep-dog Ajax, and his heart and soul bound up in his job of carving, he was at once the most absurd and lovable object in all Vermont. Disquieting, too, perhaps, for his next of kin.