Her Friend Littlejohn

was not much timber, it is true, but still
enough ; and occasionally one came across
a shattered shell of oak, which might have
been a pillar of cloudy foliage in the days
when woad was the fashionable dress mate-
rial. I have reason to believe that W. V.
invested all that wild region with a rosy
atmosphere of romance for Littlejohn.
Every blade of grass and fringe of larch was
alive with wood-magic. She trotted about
with him holding his hand, or swinging on
before him with her broad boyish shoulders
thrown well back and an air of unconscious
proprietorship of man and nature.

It was curious to note how her father’s
stories had taken hold of her, and Little-
john, with some surprise at himself and at
the nature of things at large, began to fancy
he saw motive and purpose in some of these
fantastic narratives. The legend of the girl
that was “just ’scruciatingly good”’ had evi-
dently been intended to correct a possible
tendency towards priggishness. The boy
whose abnormal badness expressed itself in
“T don’t care’ could not have been so
irredeemably wicked, or he would never have

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