The necessities of a simple life were got together, and supplemented by other greater necessities,--books, pictures, the boy's violin,--and they betook themselves to a spot where the summer visitor was yet unknown, the shore of a lake stretching a silver finger toward the north. There they lived all summer, shut off from human intercourse save with old Pierre, who brought their milk and eggs and constituted their messenger-in-ordinary to the village, ten miles away. When autumn came, Ernest Hume looked into his son's brown eyes and asked,-- "Now shall we go back?" "No! no! no!" cried the boy, with a child's passionate cumulation of accent. "Not when the snow comes?" "No, father." "And the lake is frozen over?" "No, father." "Then," said Hume, with a sigh of great content, "we must have a log-cabin, lest our bones lie bleaching on the shore." Next morning he went into the woods with Pierre and two men hastily summoned from the village, and there they began to make axe-music, the requiem of the trees. The boy sat by, dreaming as he sometimes did for hours before starting up to throw himself into the active delights of swimming, leaping, or rowing a boat. Next day, also, they kept on cutting into the heart of the forest. One dryad after another was despoiled of her shelter; one after another, the green tents of the bird and the wind were folded to make that sacred tabernacle--a home. Sometimes Francis chopped a little with his hatchet, not to be left out of the play, and then sat by again, smoothing the bruised fern-forests, or whistling back the squirrels who freely chattered out their opinions on invasion. Then came other days just as mild winds were fanning the forest into gold, when the logs went groaning through the woods, after slow-stepping horses, to be piled into symmetry, tightened with plaster, and capped by a roof. This, windowed, swept and garnished, with a central fireplace wherein two fires could flame and roar, was the log-cabin. This was home. The hired builders had protested against its primitive form; they sighed for a snug frame house, French roof and bay windows. "'Ware the cold!" was their daily croak. "We'll live in fur and toughen ourselves," said Ernest Hume. And turning to his boy that night, when they sat together by their own fire, he asked,-- "Shall we fashion our muscles into steel, our skin into armor? Shall we make our eyes strong enough to face the sun by day, and pure enough to meet the chilly stars at night? Shall we have Nature for our only love? Tell me, sir!" And Francis, who hung upon his father's voice, even when the words were beyond him, answered, "Yes, father, please!" and went on feeding birch strips to the fire, where they turned from vellum to mysterious missals blazoned by an unseen hand.