Over Paradise Ridge

"You are the real thing, Betty," was all he said as he roughed my hair, first back and then down over my eyes, and took Grandmother Nelson's spade from my hand and began to make the dirt fly out of the hole. I wonder what I'll say when those hollyhocks come up.

And then we all worked. It astonished me to find what one man, one woman, and one small boy can do to a plot of earth in three hours, with a string, sharpened sticks, seed, hoes, spades, rakes, and radiant happiness. At four o'clock we all three sank down in a heap at the end of the last row of green peas in delicious exhaustion.

"Nice little seed, I'll dig you up to-morrow to see how you feel," said the Byrd as he patted in a stray pea he had found with the beets. "I can't dig you all up, but I will as many as I can."

"Yes, you will--not," said Sam, reaching for him as he skimmed and dipped away. And then followed a lecture on floriculture, agriculture, and horticulture that I immensely enjoyed.

"Yes," assented the fledgling, with the greatest intellectual enthusiasm, "baby beets folds up jest that way," and he illustrated after Sam, with his grubby little paddies, "same as chickens in eggs and--"

"Come on, Betty, let's go select the spot for the cedar-log temple for Peter's muses," Sam interrupted as he made a lightning grab for the Byrd and tumbled him back into the loamy earth.

I realized then that up to a quarter of five o'clock on that twenty-first-of-April day I had been really wretchedly uneasy about Peter in every way, that I did and did not understand since that scene at the tea-table in the Astor when I had assumed the responsibility of him. But at that moment when Sam held back a tangle of blackberry-bushes and low-sweeping dogwood boughs, and we stepped out on a moss-covered rock-ledge that commanded a view of the Harpeth Valley, stretching away and away in an iridescent shimmer of springiness and sunshine, it completely vanished, for the time being, anyway.

"Oh," I said, with a great sigh of relief, "let's plant Peter here. He--he can grow his dream in this place."

"Yes," answered Sam, quietly, "I'll log up and daub up a shack right here, with a stone fireplace. It won't cost anything, for I'll use my own logs and pick up my own stones. Thank God for shoulders and arms which can make shelter for anybody that needs it anywhere," and as he spoke Sam looked across the valley into the blaze of the sun that was beginning to go down behind Paradise Ridge, with that earth-smolder I was beginning to recognize. I knew that David and Moses and Christ had all looked down across new life from a hillside, and Sam seemed almost transfigured to me. And I had a--a vision. I saw that Sam was to be one of a gigantic new kind of men to whom all who were ahungered and athirst would come to be cared for. I had brought Peter to him first, and I knew--I felt that others--that-"Sam," I said, as I reached out and laid a timid hand, for the first time stained with earth labor, on the blue sleeve of his overalls, "don't ever leave Peter and me anywhere you are not, will you?"