Who can fathom the heart of a boy? I recall these items especially here, because there were times when I would find my friend indisposed to play. Often in these seasons and settings, he would stop and grow strangely silent. “It’s so pretty, Billy, it hurts,” he would tell me. “It makes me—afraid!” One summer evening we sat on the Forge front steps under the stars. The crickets were cheeping about us. Now and then we saw ghostly petals of syringa blossoms flutter down in the shadows beneath, the world voluptuous with summer scents about us. “I feel as if I’d like to write and tell somebody all about it, Billy,” he said to me. “Tell ’em what?” “How it hurts!” “How what hurts?” “Oh—the world—and starry nights—just livin’ in it all. It’s holy somehow—like church.” Faint piano music floated up the valley. Somewhere below a sweet soprano voice was singing “The Blue and the Gray.” I choose to think of that night as the first time the poet-soul of my friend was disclosed to me. Yet I would have pooh-poohed poetry—then. It was stagy stuff to be recited hectically in school on Friday afternoons, beginning, “I am dying, Egypt, dying!” and the demise complete before a dozen lines had been rendered. “Billy, do you s’pose all men when they was boys felt like you and me?” “Aw, I guess so.” “Wish I knew for sure, Billy.” “What for?” “I dunno. Maybe it’d make things easier to stand.” II As Nathan’s sister Edith grew older, her petulancy of mouth became more pronounced. Like most small sisters her recreational specialty was ferreting out breaches of deportment on the part of us boys and carrying dirty little tales to our parents. Johnathan and his wife indirectly encouraged this sort of thing. They thought it “cute.” One afternoon Edith broke a barn window. She declared at once that Nathan did it. The brother’s protestations of innocence availed him nothing. He was punished on Edith’s unconfirmed say-so. Thereupon Edith discovered she held a power over Nathan. She could blackmail him into doing almost anything whim dictated by committing petty damage herself and accusing the boy as the miscreant. This went on for the better part of the autumn. Finally Edith overdid it. One evening she accused Nathan of having let the horse out of the boxstall. She swore she saw him. She gave a convincing and vivid account as an eye-witness. Only it happened Nathan had been with his father down in the village all the afternoon, unknown to Edith. Caught in a bald-faced lie, Edith snickered. Then she slapped her brother’s face as being somehow responsible. Edith was not chastised for falsehood, but Nathan got his ears boxed soundly for “daring to lay a finger on his little sister” when he defended himself. In fact, Mrs. Forge thought the escape of the horse and Edith’s discomfiture a rather good joke. If there was wrong in it, Edith would “grow out of it.” Of course! She was a girl!