The years remaining may be many or few for me, but to life’s end I shall hope to keep some measure of the joy of that one Easter day. I pray that I may always remember the tender blue of the arching sky, the white of the wisps of floating cloud, the gray purple of the spring haze lying over the forests; its silence and its peace. Looking out over the breaking ice, I remembered the story of two boys who lost their lives in the lake only last summer. They were forlorn little fellows, held in bondage by a stupid, tyrannical father. They had never seen anything that boys love—neither a circus, nor a picture, nor had ever heard a band. They had never been allowed to go even to Frontenac, the county seat, ten miles away. All they knew about was work and heavy sleep and now and then a beating. But they were boys after all, and one bright day they slipped away from the harvest field and went to the lake to go afishing. Hearing footsteps and fearing their father’s anger, they tried to escape it. The younger boy jumped into a rotting punt at the shore and pushed off on the water. The elder hid behind a rock.
Out on the lake the old punt filled and began to sink. The little fellow, seeing that he was going down and knowing that he could not swim, called out:
“Good-by, Charley; Good-by, good-by,” his piping child’s voice sang over the water.
The elder boy heard him and plunged in to his aid. Both went down, and when, at last, the grappling hooks brought up the bodies, the brothers were locked in one another’s arms.
A commonplace story, isn’t it? Such accidents happen almost every day—somewhere. There’s nothing at all in it but childish joy in freedom, dread of punishment, terror, then love and sacrifice, and, crowning all, heroic death. I think of them not as “saints in glory” but as happy youngsters, trudging, hand in hand the streets of the Eternal City; seeing, hearing, tasting all the joys that life denied them here.
Resigned to the thought of days and weeks of solitude, I was surprised by the sound of a long halloo coming from the direction of Blake’s Point.
It was Henry, standing on the extreme end of his land and calling over to me. His was the first voice I had heard for days.