From the rafters hung a dozen
pair of snow-shoes. In the centre of the floor, half overturned, lay an
open box from which tumbled dozens of pairs of moose-hide snow-shoe
moccasins.
Shades of childhood, what a place! No one of us can fail to recall with
a thrill the delights of a rummage in the attic--the joy of pulling
from some half-forgotten trunk a wholly forgotten shabby garment, which
nevertheless has taken to itself from the stillness of undisturbed
years the faint aroma of romance; the rapture of discovering in the
dusk of a concealed nook some old spur or broken knife or rusty pistol
redolent of the open road. Such essentially commonplace affairs they
are, after all, in the light of our mature common sense, but such
unspeakable ecstasies to the romance-breathing years of fancy. Here
would no fancy be required. To rummage in these silent chests and boxes
would be to rummage, not in the fictions of imagination, but the facts
of the most real picturesque. In yonder square box are the smoke-tanned
shoes of silence; that velvet dimness would prove to be the fur of a
bear; this birch-bark package contains maple sugar savoured of the
wilds. Buckskin, both white and buff, bears' claws in strings, bundles
of medicinal herbs, sweet-grass baskets fragrant as an Eastern tale,
birch-bark boxes embroidered with stained quills of the porcupines,
bows of hickory and arrows of maple, queer half-boots of stiff sealskin
from the very shores of the Hudson Bay, belts of beadwork, yellow and
green, for the Corn Dance, even a costume or so of buckskin complete
for ceremonial--all these the fortunate child would find were he to
take the rainy-day privilege in this, the most wonderful attic in all
the world.
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