apologetically, "and let him have his swim out. Likely it wouldn't have hurt the spring much. Still a body doesn't like to drink water out of a spring that a boy's been swimmin' in, no matter if his folks are clean about their house-keeping."
She was certainly sorry and so anxious to caress "Al-f-u-r-d" that she and the mother made it up, then and there, and many an afternoon thereafter did the two spend together bemoaning the evil spirit that had prompted the boy to make a swimming hole of the family spring.
Kindly invitations nor the promise of sponge cake ever induced "Al-f-u-r-d" to again visit the grounds, or the white house with green blinds, a buggy whip with silver bands on it, a big dog and two old maids who, according to Lin, "didn't know nuthin' 'bout children."
In the heydey of youth
He was awfully green,
As verdant in truth
As you have ever seen;
But he soon learned to know beans
So it seems.
"There's shorely sumthin' 'bout water that bewitches that boy," often remarked Lin. "I never seen the like of it. I'll bet anything he'll be a Baptis' preacher some day, jes' like Billy Hickman."
There never was a boy reared in Brownsville whose heart does not beat a little faster, whose breath does not come a little quicker, whose cheeks do not turn a little redder when his mind goes back to the old swimming place near Johnson's saw-mill, where the big rafts of lumber were moored seemingly for the pleasure and convenience of every boy in town. The big boys had their spring-boards for diving on the outside where the current was swifter, the water deeper, the little ones their mud slides and boards to paddle about and float on in the shallow, still water between the rafts and the bank.
There may have been factions and social distinctions as between the inhabitants of the little town when garbed and groomed, but in the nudity of the old swimming place there was a common level, and all met on an equal footing.
James G. Blaine, Philander C. Knox, Professor John Brashear
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