But there were Sundays when the boy and his mother walked over the wide prairies together, and she told him stories of Haverhill--of the wonderful people who lived there, of the great college, of the beautiful women and wise men, and best of all of his father, who was a student in the college, and they dreamed together--mother and child--about how he would board at Uncle Union's and work in the store for Uncle Abner--when the boy went back to Haverhill to school when he grew up.
On these excursions the mother sometimes tried to interest him in Mr.
Beecher's sermons which she read to him, but his eyes followed the bees and the birds and the butterflies and the shadows trailing across the hillside; so the seed fell on stony ground.

One fine fall day they went up the ridge far above the town where the court-house stands now, and there under a lone elm tree just above a limestone ledge, they spread their lunch, and the mother sat on the hillside, almost hidden by the rippling prairie grass, reading the first number of the _Atlantic Monthly_, while the boy cleared out a spring that bubbled from beneath a rock in the shade, and after running for a few feet sank under a great stone and did not appear again.

As the mother read, the afternoon waned, and when she looked up, she was astonished to see John standing beside the rock, waist deep in a hole, trying to back down into it.

His face was covered with dirt, and his clothes were wet from the falling water of the spring that was flowing into the hole he had opened.

In a jiffy she pulled him out, and looking into the hole, saw by the failing sunlight which shone directly into the place that the child had uncovered the opening of a cave.