Thunder Boy

THE wood clicked and made subdued noises in the stove, as if it had things to say. But if they were not intelligible to grown-up ears of backwoods folk, the child gurgled back at them in an equally unknown tongue. He did not know that around him for a thousand leagues stood the countless hosts of the trees. He did not guess that, out there, beyond the magic circle of firelight, and voices, lay the dumb horror of the cold; nor that here, within so small a space, the soul of the gigantic timber-world was spitting itself out to him in spurts of resinous gossip and all sorts of low companionable noises, All he knew was that here, in the empty sugar-box, with the opossum-skin lining, it was delightfully warm, and that while up there in the stove the warmth was making itself a voice, down here in the sugarbox it was making itself a smell.