On the hillside Cracked McGregor went through a kind of ceremony.
Sitting upon a log he made a telescope of his hands and looked over
the valley inch by inch like one seeking something lost. For ten
minutes he would look intently at a clump of trees or a spot in the
river running through the valley where it broadened and where the
water roughened by the wind glistened in the sun. A smile lurked in
the corners of his mouth, he rubbed his hands together, he muttered
incoherent words and bits of sentences, once he broke forth into a low
droning song.
On the first morning, when the boy sat on the hillside with his
father, it was spring and the land was vividly green. Lambs played in
the fields; birds sang their mating songs; in the air, on the earth
and in the water of the flowing river it was a time of new life.
Below, the flat valley of green fields was patched and spotted with
brown new-turned earth. The cattle walking with bowed heads, eating
the sweet grass, the farmhouses with red barns, the pungent smell of
the new ground, fired his mind and awoke the sleeping sense of beauty
in the boy. He sat upon the log drunk with happiness that the world in
which he lived could be so beautiful. In his bed at night he dreamed
of the valley, confounding it with the old Bible tale of the Garden of
Eden, told him by his mother.
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