Produced by David Edwards, Pat McCoy and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)
THE ROAD TO PARIS
BY
R. N. STEPHENS
[Illustration]
Works of
ROBERT NEILSON STEPHENS
An Enemy to the King
(Sixth Thousand)
The Continental Dragoon
(Fifth Thousand)
The Road to Paris
L. C. PAGE AND COMPANY, Publishers
(Incorporated)
196 Summer St., Boston, Mass.
THE ROAD TO PARIS
[Illustration: "A WILD THRUST BETRAYED THAT HIS EYE WAS NO
LONGER TRUE."
(_See page 536._)]
THE ROAD TO PARIS
A Story of Adventure
BY
ROBERT NEILSON STEPHENS
AUTHOR OF
"AN ENEMY TO THE KING"
"THE CONTINENTAL DRAGOON," ETC.
Illustrated by
H. C. EDWARDS
"Hark how the drums beat up again
For all true soldiers, gentlemen;
Then let us 'list and march away
Over the hills and far away."
--_Old Song._
BOSTON
L. C. PAGE AND COMPANY
(INCORPORATED)
1898
_Copyright, 1898_
By L. C. Page and Company
(INCORPORATED)
_Entered at Stationers' Hall, London_
Colonial Press
Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co.
Boston, U.S.A.
"_D'Artagnan ... touched the earth, moistened with the evening
dew, with the ends of his fingers, crossed himself as if at the
holy-water vessel of a church, and retook alone--ever alone--the
road to Paris._"
--THE VISCOUNT OF BRAGELONNE.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTION ix
I. A LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS 1
II. "OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY" 21
III. AT THE SIGN OF THE GEORGE 50
IV. OF A BROKEN SABBATH AND BROKEN
HEADS 72
V. FROM BROADWAY TO BUNKER HILL 92
VI. THE WIND OF CIRCUMSTANCE 118
VII. THE MARCH THROUGH MAINE 150
VIII. WITHIN THE WALLS OF QUEBEC 175
IX. THE INCIDENTS OF A SNOWY NIGHT 201
X. "BY FLOOD AND FIELD" 227
XI. THREE WHIMSICAL GENTLEMEN AND A
BEAUTIFUL LADY 257
XII. THE DEVIL TO PAY AT THE PELICAN INN 288
XIII. "UP AND DOWN IN LONDON TOWN" 323
XIV. "FAIR STOOD THE WIND FOR FRANCE" 352
XV. AN ELOPEMENT FROM A DILIGENCE 376
XVI. PASTORAL AND TRAGEDY 401
XVII. "STONE WALLS DO NOT A PRISON
MAKE" 426
XVIII. DICK GIVES A SPECIMEN OF AMERICAN
SHOOTING 452
XIX. THE FAVOR OF A PRINCE 474
XX. THE HONOR OF A LADY-IN-WAITING 499
XXI. "THE ROAD TO PARIS" 524
ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
"A WILD THRUST BETRAYED THAT HIS EYE WAS NO
LONGER TRUE" _Frontispiece_
"THE NEWCOMER WAS APPARENTLY ABOUT FORTY
YEARS OLD" 36
"IT WAS THE MAN SENT BY ARNOLD" 223
"BEARING THE SWOONING FORM OF AMABEL" 294
"'OH, YOU HAVE A VISITOR! MON DIEU, SILVIUS!'" 431
"FREDERICK II. RECOILED A STEP OR TWO" 518
INTRODUCTION.
"With our company of riflemen that marched in Arnold's army through the
Maine wilderness to attack Quebec, there was a sergeant's wife, a large
and sturdy woman, no common camp-follower, but decent and respected, who
one day, when the troops started to wade through a freezing pond, of
which they broke the thin ice coating with the butts of their guns,
calmly lifted her skirts above her waist and strode in, and so kept the
greater part of her clothes dry in crossing. Not a man of us made a
jest, or even grinned, so natural was her action in the circumstances. I
have often used this instance to show that what the world calls modesty
is a matter of time and place, and I now hold that too much modesty is
out of time and place when a man who has had more than a fair share of
remarkable experiences undertakes a true relation of the extraordinary
adventures that have befallen him. So, if the narrative on which I am
setting out be marred by any affectation, it will not be the affectation
of modesty.
"When I was a boy in our valley behind the Blue Mountains of
Pennsylvania, I used to read the 'True Travels, Adventures, and
Observations of Captain John Smith, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and
America, from 1593 to 1629,' and wonder whether I should ever have any
travels or adventures of my own to make a book of. When, afterwards, I
did go a travelling, and adventures did come thick and fast upon me, I
was too much engrossed in the travels and adventures themselves to give
a thought as to what matter they might be for narration. Not till this
breathing-place came in my life, did my boyhood dreams return to my
mind, and did I realize that my part in battle and imprisonment, danger
and escape, love and intrigue, would make a book that might be worth
fireside reading. That book I now begin, and shall probably finish it if
I be not interrupted by untimely death or by some new call to scenes of
enterprise and turmoil,--for it is no retired veteran, but a man early
in his twenties, that here tries whether with pen and ink he can make as
fair a show as he has already made with implements less peaceful."
The foregoing lines constitute the first two paragraphs of a book
entitled "The Travels and Adventures of Richard Wetheral, in America,
England, France, and Germany, in the years 1775, 1776, 1777, and 1778,"
of which it happens, by strange circumstance, that I possess the only
copy. The title-page shows that it was published by (or "printed for")
J. Robson, Bookseller, in New Bond Street, London, in 1785. The three
brown 16mo volumes first caught my glance when they lay with a heap of
ragged books on a board before a second-hand shop in Twenty-sixth
Street, there being attached to the board a weather-beaten square of
pasteboard, bearing the legend, "Your choice for ten cents." Not until I
had paid the dealer thirty cents and separated the three volumes forever
from their musty companions, which were mostly of a theological
character, did I discover, by parting a blank leaf from the adjacent
cover, to which it had long been sticking, that the book was a treasure,
for which the dealer would have charged me as many dollars as I had paid
cents, had he anticipated my discovery. The long-concealed page bore on
its brown-spotted surface an inscription, in eighteenth century
handwriting, turned yellow by age, signed by the author of the book, and
to the effect that he had caused his true narrative to be published
without his wife's knowledge, thinking this book might afford her a
pleasant surprise, but that the surprise with which she first perused it
was so far from pleasant, she had forthwith, in the name of modesty,
demanded its immediate suppression, which was at once accomplished by
her indulgent husband, who had preserved only this one copy for the
benefit of posterity. When I asked the bookseller how he had come by
the copy, he told me, after an investigation, that he had bought it with
a lot of religious books from the servant of a very old lady recently
deceased. The dealer had thought, from the company in which it came,
that the "travels and adventures" were those of some clergyman of a
hundred years ago, and he had placed the three much dilapidated volumes
among the ten-cent rubbish accordingly.
In giving this astonishing record of eighteenth century vicissitudes to
the world, I have two reasons for making myself the historian, and not
presenting the hero's book in his own correct and straightforward
English. The first reason is, the public has been so satiated recently
with novels told in the first person singular, that even a genuine
autobiography must at this time be swallowed, if at all, with some
nausea. The second reason is that the hero, writing only of his own
doings and his own witnessings and in his own day, necessarily omitted
many details, obtainable by me from other sources, and useful not only
for filling in the background of his narrative, but also that they throw
light on some points that were not quite clear to himself.
THE ROAD TO PARIS.
CHAPTER I.
A LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS.
In the Jacobite army that followed Prince Charlie and shared defeat with
him at Culloden in 1746, were some who escaped hanging at Carlisle or
elsewhere by fleeing to Scottish ports and obtaining passage over the
water. A few, like the Young Chevalier himself, fled to the continent of
Europe; but some crossed the ocean and made new lives for themselves in
Virginia, Pennsylvania, and other provinces. Two of these refugees,
tarrying not in the thickly settled strip of country along the Atlantic
coast, but pushing at once to the backwoods of Pennsylvania, were Hugh
Mercer, the young surgeon destined to die gloriously as an American
general thirty years later, and Alexander Wetheral, one of the few
Englishmen who had rallied to the Stuart standard at its last unfurling.
From Philadelphia, where they disembarked from the vessel that had
brought them from Leith, straight westward through Lancaster and across
the Susquehanna, the two young men made a journey which, thanks to the
privations they had to endure, was a good first lesson in the school of
wilderness life.
They arrived one evening at the wigwams of a Shawnee village on the
verge of a beaver pond, and were received in so friendly a manner by the
Indians that Wetheral decided to live for a time among them. Mercer,
joined by some other enterprising newcomers from the old country, went
farther westward; but the two friends were destined to meet often again.
Wetheral built himself a hut near the Indian village and indulged to the
full his love of hunting, fishing, and roaming the silent forest. Often
he saw other white men, for already the Scotch and Irish and English had
begun to build their cabins and to clear small fields on both sides of
the Susquehanna, across which river there were ferries at a few
infantile settlements. By 1750 so many other English and Scotch, some of
the men having their wives with them, had put up log cabins near
Wetheral's, and had cleared ground for farming all around, that the
settlement merited a name, and took that of Carlisle. The Indians,
succumbing to the inevitable, betook themselves elsewhere.
Wetheral, with all his love for the free life of the woods, welcomed
civilization, for he was of gentle birth and of what passed in those
days as good education, and had a taste for learning. His life was now
more diversified. He not only hunted and fished, but also cultivated a
few acres, and during a part of each year he did the duties of
schoolmaster to the settlement,--for the Scotch-Irish, like the Puritans
of New England, went in for book-learning. He sent the skins obtained by
him in the chase to Philadelphia by pack-horse, and sometimes, for the
sake of variety, accompanied them, passing, on the way, through the belt
of country industriously tilled by the growing German Protestant
population, and through that occupied by Quakers and other English, in
the immediate vicinity of Philadelphia. In his own neighborhood the
people of the best manners and information were Presbyterians, and in
course of time he came to count himself as one of them, less from
religious ideas than from a natural wish to associate himself with the
respectable and lettered element; for, much as he loved the roaming life
of the hunter, he was repelled by the coarseness and violence and ill
living of a certain class of nomadic frontiersmen who doubtless had good
reason to keep their distance from politer communities.
He was one of the Pennsylvanians who went as pioneers in Braddock's
fatal expedition, and on that he saw Colonel Washington. He marched with
his old friend, Hugh Mercer, in the battalion of three hundred men
under Col. John Armstrong, of Carlisle, in 1756, from Fort Shirley to
the Indian town of Kittanning, which the troops destroyed after killing
most of its hostile inhabitants. During a part of that year and of the
next, he served in the provincial garrison at Fort Augusta, far north
from Carlisle, and east of the Susquehanna.
Returning home when his period of enlistment was up, he stopped at the
large house of a prosperous English settler possessing part of a fine
island in the Susquehanna, fell in love with one of the settler's
daughters, prolonged his visit two weeks, proposed marriage to the
daughter, was accepted, spoke to her father, was by him violently
rejected and subsequently ejected, ran away with the girl, or rather
paddled away, for the means of locomotion in this elopement was an
Indian canoe, and was married in the settlement of Paxton, near John
Harris's ferry, by the Reverend John Elder.
As the young wife, who was kind of heart and wise of head, desired to be
near the roof whence she had fled, that a reconciliation might be the
more easily attempted, Wetheral traded off his field and cabin at
Carlisle, returned northward across the Kitocktinning mountains to the
neighborhood of his wife's former home, built a log house of two rooms
and a loft, near the left bank of the Juniata, a few miles above that
river's junction with the Susquehanna, and there, in the month of
April, 1758, he became the father of Richard Wetheral, the hero of this
book.
The child's arrival was aided by his maternal grandmother, who had
already melted towards the young couple, although her husband still held
out against them. The surgeon whom Mr. Wetheral had summoned from Fort
Hunter, which the settlers were garrisoning because of signs of an
Indian outbreak, arrived too late to do more than pronounce the boy a
healthy specimen and predict the speedy recovery of the mother, who was
indeed of sturdy stock. The household whose different members the
observant infant soon began to discriminate consisted of the father,
whose dauntless and hearty character has already been slightly
indicated; the mother, who was comely and strong in nature as in face
and form; a younger sister of the mother's, and a raw but ready youth
hired by the father to aid in working the little rude farm and in
protecting the family from any of the now rampant Indians who might
threaten it. For Mr. Wetheral's house was so near Fort Hunter that he
chose to stay and occupy it rather than to take refuge within the
stockade of the fort, which latter course was followed by many settlers
of the near-by valleys when the Indian alarm came in the month of our
hero's birth.
But the Wetherals were not molested by any of the Indians that roamed
the woods in small parties, in quest of the scalps of palefaces, during
the spring and summer of 1758. Often, though, there came news by horse
and canoe, and carried from settlement to settlement, from farm-cabin to
farm-cabin, of frequent depredations: how in York County Robert Buck was
killed and scalped at Jamieson's house and all the rest of its dwellers
were carried away; how, near at home, in Sherman's Valley, a woman was
horribly killed and scalped; how, in July, Captain Craig, riding about
seven miles from Harris's Ferry, was suddenly struck in the face by a
tomahawk thrown from ambush, put spurs to his horse and fled from his
yelling savage assailants, escaping by sheer speed of his animal, the
blood flowing from the huge gash cut in his cheek by the well-aimed
hatchet; how fared the soldiers who set off in search and pursuit of the
red-faced enemy, and who were none other than the hardiest of the
settlers themselves, accustomed to shoot Indians or bear, to burn out
rattlesnake nests, or to farm the ill-cleared land, as occasion might
require.
Thus the talk to which Dick Wetheral (for it was early settled that he
should be called Richard, a favorite name in his mother's family) became
accustomed, as soon as he knew what any talk meant, was of frightful
perils and daring achievements. Such talk continued throughout all his
childhood, though after 1758 the Indians were peaceful towards central
Pennsylvania until 1763.
The boy early showed an adventurous disposition. His first explorations,
conducted on all-fours, were confined to the two rooms on the ground
floor of the house, but at that stage of his career a journey to the end
of the kitchen from the extremity of the other apartment, which served
as parlor and principal bedroom, was one of length and incident. New
territory was opened to him to roam, on that eventful day when his aunt
carried him up the ladder to the loft, which was divided by a partition
into two rude sleeping-chambers, and in which he derived as great joy
from being set at large as Alexander would have drawn from the discovery
of a new world to conquer.
When the boy was in his second year, his world underwent a vast
enlargement. This came about through his father's building a house to
which the original log cabin of his birth became merely the rear wing.
The new structure, made of logs covered with rough-sawn planks, destined
to be annually whitewashed, provided two rooms on the ground floor, and
two bed-chambers overhead. One of these lower rooms communicated by a
door with the original log building, of which the ground floor was
transformed, by the removal of the partition, into one large kitchen.
From the new parlor a flight of stairs led to the room above, whence a
low door and a few descending steps gave entrance to the old loft, so
that the young explorer, by dint of long exertion, could reach the
second story unaided. And now his days were full of experiences. From
his favorite spot near the kitchen fireplace, to the farthest corner of
the spare bedroom down-stairs, by way of the parlor (which was
invariably called "the room"), was a trip sufficient for ordinary days.
But in times of extraordinary energy and ambition, the crawling Dick
would make the grand tour up the stairs and through the four
second-story apartments, which seemed countless in number, and each a
whole province in itself. So long ago was yesterday from to-day, at that
time of his life, that this immense journey was full of novelty to him
at each repetition, the adventures of one journey having been forgotten
before another could be undertaken. And these adventures were as
numerous as befell Christian in his Pilgrim's Progress. There were dark
corners, queer-looking articles of furniture seemingly with life and
expression, shadows of strange shapes, that made the young traveller
pause and hold his breath and half turn back, until reassured by the
sound of his aunt's voice calling to the chickens in the kitchen yard,
his father or the hired man sharpening his sickle or calling to the
plow-horse in the field beyond, or--most welcome and reassuring of
all--his mother singing at her work in the rooms below.
What a great evening was that when the little indoor explorer found a
fellow traveller! Dick was already in bed and asleep, having retired
somewhat against his will, as he would have preferred to remain up until
his father's return from a horseback journey on business down the river.
When he was awakened by his mother, on whose face he saw a smile that
promised something pleasant, he blinked once or twice in the
candle-light, and looked eagerly around. He saw his father standing near
his mother, and between the two a great black head whose long jaws were
open in a kind of merry grin of good-fellowship, and from between whose
white teeth protruded a red tongue that evinced an impulse to meet the
wondering Dickie's face half way. The boy gazed for a moment, then threw
out his hands towards the beaming face of the newcomer, and screamed
with gleeful laughter. A moment later the dog was licking the
youngster's face, while Dick, still laughing, was burying his fingers in
the animal's shaggy black coat. Thereafter, the boy Dick was attended on
all his expeditions by the dog Rover, and never were two more devoted
comrades. The dog was a mixture of Scotch collie and black spaniel, and,
though in size between those two breeds, looked a huge animal from the
view-point of two years. If Dick required less than the usual grown-up
assistance in learning to walk, it was because Rover was of just the
size to serve as a support.
Dick now began to make excursions outdoors. Of course he had already
spent much time in the open air, but always under the eye of some member
of the household. His previous travels from the house had, by this
guardianship, been robbed of the zest of adventure. The first trips
abroad that he made independently were clandestine. Thus, one afternoon
when the men were in the fields, and his aunt was busy tracing figures
in the fresh sand that had been laid on the parlor floor, he availed
himself of his mother's preoccupation over her spinning-wheel to sally
forth from the kitchen door with no other company than Rover. His
mother, humming a tune while she span, did not at first notice the
silence in that part of the kitchen where Dick's presence was usually
manifest to the ear. At last, the bark of Rover, coming with a note of
alarm from a distance of several rods beyond the kitchen door, roused
her to a sense of the boy's absence. With wildly beating heart she ran
out, and towards the sound, which came from beyond the fruit-trees and
wild grapevines that bounded the kitchen yard. She soon saw that Rover's
call for help had reason. Little Dick was leaning over the edge of a
deep spring, staring with amusement at his own image in the clear
shaded water. Who knows but the nymphs of the spring would have drawn
him in, as Hylas was drawn, had not the mother arrived at that moment,
for the boy was reaching out to grasp the face in the water when she
caught him by the waist?
Another time, it was not the warning bark of Rover, but the merest
accident, that rescued the boy from a situation as perilous. His aunt,
going into the little barn near the house, to look for eggs, saw him
sitting directly under one of the plow-horses in a stall, watching with
interest the movements of the animal's fore-feet, as they regularly
pawed the ground. On being taken back to the house, little Dick was made
to understand that solitary expeditions were forbidden, and in so sharp
a manner that thereafter he rarely violated orders. He was carefully
watched against the recurrence of temptation to travel. A constant
source of terror to the mother, on Dick's account, was the nearness of
the river, whose bed lay a few rods to the south, not far from the foot
of a steep bank which fell from the piece of ground on which the house
stood. This piece of ground was surrounded by a rude fence, and the boy
spent many a longing quarter of an hour in looking through the rails at
the river that flowed gently, with constant murmur, below. Between the
river and the bank ran what some called a road, what may have formerly
been an Indian trail, and what in Dick's time was really but a rough
path for horses. It led from the farms farther back up the river, behind
the azure mountains at the west, down to the more thickly settled
country beyond the mountains at the east, and afar it joined the road to
Lancaster and Philadelphia.
The boy's parents early taught him his letters, for the elder Wetheral
had brought a few books with his meagre baggage from the old country,
and had since acquired, from some of the settlers of the best class, a
few more, two by dying bequest, two by gift, and four or five by
purchase and trade. With the contents of some of these, Dick first
became acquainted through his father's reading aloud on Sundays and
rainy days, before the kitchen fire. One of these was Capt. John Smith's
account of his marvellous achievements. Strangely enough, or rather
naturally enough, the parts of this book that most interested Dick were
not where Smith told of his adventures with Indians in America, but
where he related his doings in Europe; for Indians and primitive
surroundings were familiar matters to Dick, whereas accounts of the old
world had for him all that charm which a boy reared in the midst of
civilization finds in pictures of wilderness life. A few of the books
were illustrated with prints, which the boy studied by the hour. One of
these books was an odd volume of a history of the world, and contained
mainly that part which related to France. It had crude engravings of two
or three palaces, a few kings, three or four queens, a Catholic killing
a Huguenot in front of the Church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, a royal
hunt, and the Pont Neuf, backed by the towers of Notre Dame and flanked
by buildings along the Seine. These rough pictures, thanks to some
mysterious cause or other, exercised on little Dick a potent
fascination.
"Who is that?" he asked his mother one day, pointing to a wood-cut that
purported to portray a human being, as he lay sprawling on the floor,
his favorite book opened out before him.
"That is a king," replied his mother, looking down from her sewing. The
mother and the boy were alone in the kitchen.
"King David?"
"No; a king of France."
"King George?"
"No; King George is king of England, where your father came from, and
your grandfather, and of America, where we are. France is another
country."
"Where does this king live?" pointing to the wood-cut.
"He is dead now. He died long ago. He lived in a city called Paris, in
the country called France."
"Is that a house?" The boy had turned to a supposed picture of the
Louvre.
"Yes, a great, big house, a palace they call it, because it belongs to
the king."
"Did it belong to that king?"
"Yes, I think so. It is in the city where I told you that king lived,
Paris."
"Is this house in that city, too?" He indicated a building in the
picture that showed the Pont Neuf.
"Yes." The mother laid down her sewing and stooped beside the boy. "And
so is this house in Paris. And this. And this, too. All these houses are
in Paris."
"Do all these people live there, the pretty ladies and soldiers?"
"They all did, I suppose."
"How many houses are there in Paris?"
"Oh, a great many thousand."
"More than there are in Carlisle?"
"Oh, yes! A hundred times more."
"Where is Paris?"
"Oh, very, very far away."
"Which way?"
"Why, that way, I think." She pointed towards the east. "Your father can
tell you exactly, when he comes in."
"How far away is it? As far as Carlisle?"
"Much farther than that. Your father can tell you."
"As far as Lancaster?"
"Oh, farther. Farther than Philadelphia. Away across land and water."
"As far away as the farthest mountains yonder, the blue ones against the
sky?" He had risen from the floor, and he pointed eastward through the
open kitchen doorway.
"Oh, yes. If you went clear across those mountains, you wouldn't be near
Paris yet."
"But if I went on and on, far enough, I'd get to Paris at last, wouldn't
I?"
"Yes, at last," said the mother, smiling, and drawing the boy to her and
kissing him, impelled by the mere thought of the separation his query
suggested to the fancy.
When she returned to her sewing, he continued looking for awhile towards
the distant east, then resumed his study of the pictures. At supper that
evening he made his father laugh by asking which way a body should go,
to get to Paris. His mother explained how his curiosity had been
aroused. His father, laughing again, and winking at the mother, said:
"Why, boy, a body would have to start by the road that goes down the
river to your grandfather's, that's certain. And if a body travelled
long enough, and never lost his way, yes, he would surely get to Paris
at the end."
"Would he be very tired when he got there?"
"Very tired, indeed, if he didn't rest several times on the way,"
replied Wetheral, Senior, keeping up the joke.
The next afternoon Dick's mother, having baked some cakes of a kind that
she knew her husband liked hot, sent some of them by the boy to the two
men in the field, which was not far from the house but was partly hidden
therefrom by the barn and out-buildings and some fruit-trees. Dick,
being now four years old, had often gone to the fields with his aunt or
mother when water or food had been carried out to the men at work, and
as the way did not lie near the river, there seemed no risk in sending
him now alone. When, after due time, he did not return to the house, the
two women supposed the men had kept him with them in the field. But this
was not the case. Mr. Wetheral and the hired man, having seen little
Dick tripping back towards the house, ate the cakes in the shade of a
tree and returned with sickles to their attack on the wheat, with no
thought of the boy but that he was now safe home. When they returned in
the evening for supper, their surprise in not finding him there was
reciprocated by that of the women at his not coming back with the men.
The dog, which had accompanied him to the field and from it, also was
missing. The men immediately started in search.
The boy by this time was some distance away. He had crawled through the
fence, near the barn, descended the declivity to the horse-path by the
river, turned his face eastward, and trudged resolutely on with Rover at
his heels. It was some time before he would admit to himself that he was
becoming a little tired, and that the stones and twigs in the way were
bruising his bare feet perceptibly. At last he conceded himself a short
rest, and, following Rover's example, leaned over where the bank was low
and the river shallow, and drank. He was soon up again and going
forward, forgetful of his former fatigue, and heedless that the sun
behind him was nearing the horizon. So long a time is a day to a child!
In the afternoon the doings of the morning are of the dim past, or are
forgotten, while the evening is yet far away, and countless things may
be done before the night comes. He could surely reach those farthest
blue mountains in an hour or so, and a little walking thereafter must
bring him to this strange, wonderful Paris, so entirely different from
his own home and from his grandfather's place down the river. He would
have to pass his grandfather's place, by the way, on his walk, and it
never occurred to him how long a time it would take him to reach merely
his grandfather's, so vague was his recollection of his former visits
there. He could see Paris, the king and the palaces and the soldiers and
the beautiful ladies and the great bridge, and return home by
supper-time; and he would have so many things to tell that his father
and mother would make his punishment a light one, or might even forget
to punish him at all.
He came to a place where the path divided. After a moment's hesitation,
he took the wider branch, which carried him from the riverside, straight
into the unbroken woods. Presently this path ended abruptly, so that
there was nothing before him but thick undergrowth. Rather than retrace
his steps to reach the branch that he had rejected, which must be the
one he ought to have taken, he started to reach it directly through the
woods, moving towards where he thought it should be. He made his way
cautiously, lest he might tread on some rattlesnake or other serpent,
which could not be as easily seen in the dimness of the forest as in the
path by the river. That dimness increased apace, and still he had not
found the path. At last the boy paused, perplexed and a little appalled.
The chill of evening came on. He was very tired now. He began to think
of Indians, bears, and other savage things with whose existence in the
neighborhood he was well acquainted, and of monsters of which he had
heard from his parents, such as giants, lions, and other horrible
things. Wherever his view lost itself in the dark arches of the trees,
he imagined mysterious and frightful creatures were concealed, ready to
appear at any moment. He summoned heart, and trudged on again. Finally
it became so dark that he feared to proceed lest he might, at any step,
land in a nest of snakes. Rover stopped close beside him, and looked in
his face, as if for counsel. He put his arm around the dog's neck, and
the two together sank down on some mossy turf at the foot of a tree.
Rover curled up with his chin on the boy's shoulder, and Dick lay with
his head on the dog's shaggy side. Dick would have cried, had his
impulse ruled, but he was already too proud to make such an exhibition
of weakness in the presence of Rover. Thus they lay while night fell.
Now and then Rover raised his head a little and listened. The boy was
too much overcome by his situation to think of what might ultimately
befall. He could only wish, with an intensity as keen as could be
endured, that he was home by his mother's side in the candle-lit
kitchen, and nestle closer to the dog. The insects of the forest kept up
an ear-piercing chorus of chirps, whirrs, and calls. At last reality
melted imperceptibly into dreams, in which the boy was again toiling
forward on the road to Paris. A terrible noise broke in upon his dream.
Starting up, he found it was only the barking of Rover, a bark of
eagerness and joy rather than of alarm or threat. A faint light
approached slowly through the trees. It resolved itself at last into a
lantern, and the huge dark object beside it became a man, who called
out, as he came rapidly nearer:
"Dick, lad, are you there with the dog?"
A minute later the boy was in the arms of his father, who was striding
back towards the path, while Rover ran yelping gleefully before and
behind and on every side.
How short was the journey back to the house, compared with that which
Dick had made from it in the afternoon! Almost before Dick had finished
his explanation to his father, in somewhat incoherent speeches and a
rather unsteady voice, they beheld the kitchen's open door, in which the
mother stood waiting. She caught the boy in her arms, covered his face
with kisses and tears, and declared he should never go out of her sight
again.
"But I'll go some day, when I'm grown up," said little Dick, as he sat
filling himself with supper a half-hour later. "I didn't know the road
to Paris was so long."
And he didn't know his road to Paris should one day be taken with no
thought of its leading him there, and how very roundabout that road
should be.