XXXIX 



TWO SHOTS 



A BOY of fourteen, alert, but too full 

 of life to move slowly and cautiously, is 

 walking along an old road in the woods, 

 a road that winds here and there with 

 meanderings that now seem vagrant 

 and purposeless but once led to the va- 

 ■rious piles of cordwood and logs for 

 whose harvesting it was hewn. Goodly 

 trees have since grown up from sap- 

 lings that the judicious axe then scorned. 

 Beeches, whose flat branches are shelves 

 of old gold ; poplars, turned to towers of 

 brighter metal by the same alchemy of 

 autumn ; and hemlocks, pyramids of un- 

 changing green, shadow the leaf-strewn 

 forest floor and its inconspicuous dotting 

 of gray and russet stumps. How happy 

 the boy is in the freedom of the woods ; 

 proud to carry his first own gun, as he 

 treads gingerly but somewhat noisily 

 over the fallen leaves and dry twigs, 

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