Читать книгу New Ideas for American Boys; The Jack of All Trades - Daniel Carter Beard - Страница 9

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which, I believe, has never yet been discovered by the enemy, nor any one else.[2] To reach our secret camp and club-house we had to trudge along the dusty turnpike in the hot sun, with no shade but that afforded by our wide-brimmed straw hats. After passing an old-fashioned inn, with its swinging sign decorated with a picture of the battle of Buena Vista, we cut cross-lots over the forts and rifle-pits on the hill-side, built by the Union soldiers at the time of the Morgan raid. At the end of the lowest rifle-pit we slid down the cut to the railroad track, and followed it to the fence, with a hollow gate-post, where the bluebirds always built their nests. Here we left the railway and entered a cool belt of woods in which the dainty maidenhair-ferns grew on the damp rotten logs and the gray squirrels scolded us from the branches overhead. Following a private trail, we reached an immense beech-tree which had grown around a shaggy-barked hickory in such a manner that only the roots and branches of the hickory could be seen, the whole trunk being embedded and concealed by the smooth bark of the beech, giving it the novel appearance of a tree bearing two entirely different kinds of nuts.

Under the spreading branches of this compound tree we generally rested awhile and took a look about us, to be certain that the River Rats were not on our trail; then diving into the hazel thicket, we emerged on the banks of a tributary to the Licking River. A giant tulip-tree stood on the bank of the creek, and a wild grape-vine, as thick as your arm, dangled from the branches, which spread like an umbrella sixty or seventy feet above us. The vine had been cut loose from its roots on the shore, and its severed end hung over a deep, dark pool.

Fig. 1.—Beginning a Two-tree Foundation.