But his allegiance to the teacher was only lip service.

For at night when he sat digging the gravel and dirt from the holes in the heels of his copper-toed boots, that he might wad them with paper to be ready for his skates on the morrow, or when he sat by the wide fireplace oiling the runners with the steel curly-cues curving over the toes, or filing a groove in the blades, the boy's greatest joy was with his mother.

Sometimes as she ironed she told him stories of his father, or when the child was sick and nervous, as a special favour, on his promise to take the medicine and not ask for a drink, she would bring her guitar from under the bed and tune it up and play with a curious little mouse-like touch.

And on rare occasions she would sing to her own shy maidenly accompaniment, her voice rising scarcely higher than the wind in the sycamore at the spring outside.

The boy remembered only one line of an old song she sometimes tried to sing: "Sleeping, I dream, love, dream, love, of thee," but what the rest of it was, and what it was all about, he never knew; for when she got that far, she always stopped and came to the bed and lay beside him, and they both cried, though as a child he did not know why.
So the winter of 1857 wore away at Sycamore Ridge, and with the coming of the spring of '58, when the town was formally incorporated, even into the boy world there came the murmurs of strife and alarms.