FullReads

Furthermore the village was full of people already, and half a dozen of them had been so clearly designed by the Poor Boy’s imagination that he could see them, every line of their faces, every detail of their clothes. He knew every intonation of their voices. When he talked with them, he did not have to make up their answers–they just came. And better, other people, at first dim figureheads, were becoming clearer and more vivid all the time, so it seemed sure that before long he would know even the dogs of his settlement by sight.

The greatest difficulty in the game that he was playing lay in the imperfection of his memory. As he built each house in the village he saw it as plainly as I see the pages on which I am writing, but leaving it to go at the next house he had to return again and again to fix the image of the first. For instance, he got the whole village built, and lying in his bed that night could only remember with real distinction the commission house, the library, and one dwelling house, far down the main street. The rest was vague–houses–white houses–not high–not crowded, but all blurred and without detail, as if seen through tears.

He built the village, parts of it, four or five times before it became a definite thing to him. Before he could stop, let us say, before the Browns’ house and take pleasure in the trim of their front door, before he could see the heliotrope growing in the snow-white jardiniere in the living-room window, before he knew that Mrs. Brown made cookies every Friday, and that if you went round to the kitchen door and were very hungry and polite she gave them away while they were still hot and crisp.

It was precisely to call on Mrs. Brown that the Poor Boy had been so eager to leave his own house. Realities began for him at the bottom of the cliff. The road to the village crossed the glade in the pine woods–the snow was packed and icy with much travel, with the sliding of runners and the semicircular marks of horses’ hoofs. As the Poor Boy sped along on his skis, he met people in sleighs and was overtaken and passed by others. They were his people–his alone. He had cheerful words for all of them, and they for him. They were hazy–a little–to the eye, but here and there he caught a face clearly and did not forget it again–a baby in a blue-and-white blanket coat, that had bright red cheeks and that smiled and showed two brand-new teeth; a boy with bare hands and red knuckles (the Poor Boy sent him a pair of warm mittens from the village store), and ears (one bigger than the other) which stuck straight out.

The Poor Boy came to a halt suddenly where a stream too vigorous to be ice-bound crossed the road (under a concrete bridge that had been built only the day before), ran out over a ledge of smooth granite and fell thirty feet with a roar.

“Yes,” said the Poor Boy, “there’s got to be a sawmill with a red roof and flower-boxes in the windows, and this is just the place for it or I’m very much mistaken…. I wonder … I wish to the deuce Mr. Tinker was here, he’s the best man we’ve got on water-power. The woods are full of trees that ought to be cut for the benefit of the others. Yardsley was showing me about them only yesterday. But this is a matter for Tinker.”

The Poor Boy listened and heard sleigh-bells. They came swiftly nearer.

“Wonder who this is?”

Around the nearest turn of the road toward the village came a powerful roan horse, drawing a cutter; in the cutter sat an enormous man, but the Poor Boy had already recognized the horse.