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Now this imagination of the Poor Boy’s was not a servant that came and went at command, but a master. He could not say to himself, “now I will lie back upon the wings of my imagination and fly a pleasant hour”–or rather he could say just that if he liked, but nothing would happen. It was he who served; he was an abode in which his imagination might lodge whenever it so pleased, and whence it might also fare forth. In the old days it had found lodgment in the Poor Boy’s head decidedly comfortable, and had made long stays; but since society had wreaked its vengeance upon him, it seemed as if his head, as a dwelling-place, had lost its comforts and advantages.

His imagination was not of the kind which makes for literature or music. It could not, in other words, shake itself clear of experience, and journey into the unknown and the untried. It was not creative, but it was of a quality so intense and vivid as to wage, sometimes, successful disputes with the tangible and the real. Its action was a kind of dreaming of dreams, whose direction and outcome lay within the option of the dreamer.

Old Martha found him one day sitting on the kitchen steps with his feet in the first snow of the winter. But the Poor Boy was really at Palm Beach with a car-load of his friends, and he was not at all cold, he thanked her, but hot–positively hot.

Notwithstanding, she ordered a change of shoes and socks, and listened at his door half a dozen times that night for sounds of incipient cold.

The old woman’s mirror told her that she was getting thin, that the work she had undertaken was too hard for her, and sometimes when the men drove in from the village with supplies (and the Poor Boy hid himself) she blarneyed them into lending a hand here and there. For a good joke sweetened with a little base flattery she got coals carried now and then, or heavy pieces of furniture moved when she was house-cleaning; but to the Poor Boy’s constant appeals that she bring into the house a permanent helper she turned a deaf ear. As a matter of fact, having lived the best part of her life for the Poor Boy, she proposed, if possible, to die for him.

But when (“on top of the thinness,” as he put it) she caught a heavy cold, he took the matter in dispute wholly out of her jurisdiction.

The cold having run its course and gone its way, he appeared to her one morning dressed for the winter woods. He had on moccasins and many thicknesses of woolens; he carried a knapsack and a light axe. He laid these on the kitchen table, and went into the cellar, where his long skis had passed the summer. He brought them, turning the corner of the cellar stairs with difficulty, back to the kitchen, and began to examine the straps with which they are adjusted to the feet. He asked for a little oil with which to dress the leather. She brought him oil in a saucer.

He dressed the straps of his skis and talked, more to himself than to her.

“Killing is bad, but in case I do actually run out of food I’d better take a rifle. I suppose the sleeping-bag will keep me warm, still I’d take along an extra blanket if it weren’t so heavy. I’m not as fit as I used to be. Seems to me this compass acted queerly the last time I used it. Didn’t I tell you once, Martha, about getting lost up here because a compass played me tricks? There were people to find me that time–but what’s the odds? I can’t get lost twice on my own acres. And what’s the odds if I do?–“

Old Martha couldn’t stand it any longer.