With people of the sort who live in towns he was unacquainted, but with nature's people he was on closer terms.

He had a great friend and crony in a person who had been a teacher, and who had come to this frontier life from a broader field.

This person was his mother.

With his father he was also on a relationship of familiarity, but the father was, necessarily, out with his axe most of the time, and so it came that the young man and his mother were more literally growing up together with the country.

To her he went with such problems as his great mind failed to solve, and he had come to have a very good opinion of her indeed.