toiled not, neither did they spin, but reaped with gusto where we had sown.

After a few years of this profitless drudgery, my father bought an old run-down farm with dilapidated buildings in the neighboring town of R——, mortgaging all, and our souls and bodies besides, for its payment. We hoped we had rounded the cape of storms which sooner or later looms up before every ship which sails the sea of life, for we had fully realized the truth of the poem—

  We may steer our boats by the compass,
    Or may follow the northern star;
  We may carry a chart on shipboard
    As we sail o'er the seas afar;
  But, whether by star or by compass
    We may guide our boats on our way,
  The grim cape of storms is before us,
    And we'll see it ahead some day.

  How the prow may point is no matter,
    Nor of what the cargo may be,
  If we sail on the northern ocean,
    Or away on the southern sea;
  It matters not who is the pilot,
    To what guidance our course conforms;
  No vessel sails o'er the sea of life
    But must pass the cape of storms.

  Sometimes we can first sight the headland
    On the distant horizon's rim;
  We enter the dangerous waters
    With our vessels taut and trim;
  But often the cape in its grimness
    Will before us suddenly rise,
  Because of the clouds that have hid it
    Or the blinding sun in our eyes.

  Our souls will be caught in the waters
    That are hurled at the storm cape's face;
  Our pleasures and joys, our hopes and fears,
    Will join in the maddening race.
  Our prayers, desires, our penitent griefs,
    Our longings and passionate pain,
  Be dashed to spray on the stormy cape
    And fly in our faces like rain.

  But there's always hope for the sailor,
    There is ever a passage through;
  No life goes down at the cape of storms,
    If the life and the heart lie true.
  If in purpose the soul is steadfast,
    If faithful in mind and in will,
  The boat will glide to the other side,
    Where the ocean of life is still.

[Illustration: "It was a Fair Scene of Tranquillity."]

CHAPTER III.

NEAR TO NATURE'S HEART.

It seems but yesterday, although more than a half century ago, that I, a puny boy, stood on the hilltop and looked for the first time upon this, the earliest home of which I have any vivid recollection. It was a fair scene of rustic tranquillity, where a contented mind might delight to spend a lifetime mid hum of bees and low of kine.

Along the eastern horizon's rim loomed the blue sea beyond the sandy dunes of old Plum Island; the lazy river born in babbling brooks and bubbling springs flowing languidly mid wooded islands, and picturesque stacks of salt hay, representing the arduous toil of farmers and dry-as-dust fodder for reluctant cows. Nearer, the two church spires of the little village, striving to lift the sordid minds of the natives from earthly clods to the clouds, and where beckoning hands strove vainly to inspire them with heavenly hopes; around them, glistening in the sunlight, the marble slabs where sleep the rude forefathers of the hamlet, some mute inglorious Miltons who came from England in the early sixties, whose tombstones are pierced by rifle bullets fired at the maraudering red skins. These are the cities of the dead, far more populous than the town of the living.

Nearer, the willowy brook that turns the mill; to the south the dense pine woods, peopled in our imaginations, with fairy elves, owls, and hobgoblins—now, alas, owing to the rapacity of the sawmills, naught but a howling wilderness of stumps and underbrush.

Directly below me, stands our half-century old house with its eaves sloping to the ground, down which generations of boys had ruined their pants in hilarious coasting; near by, the ancient well-swipe, and the old oaken bucket which rose from the well; beyond this, of course, as usual, the piggery and hennery to contaminate the water and breed typhoid fever, and in the house cellar, the usual dampness from the hillside to supply us all with rheumatism and chills.

There existed apparently in the early dawn of the nineteenth century, an unwritten law which required the farmers to violate all the laws of sanitation, and then to ascribe all ills the flesh is heir to, to the mysterious will of an inscrutable Providence whose desire it was to make the heart better by the sorrows of the countenance, and to save the soul from hell by the punishment of the body. Vegetables were allowed to rot in the cellars, and to make everybody sick with their noxious odors so that we might not be too much wedded to this transitory existence. Pork, beans, and cabbage must be devoured in enormous quantities just before going to bed for the purpose of inspiring midnight groans and prayers to be delivered from the pangs of the civil war in the inner man.

This moralizing is inspired by the pessimism of disenchanted age; but on that beautiful morning of the long ago, naught occurred to me save the wedlock of earth and heaven: I was near to nature's heart, listening to the ecstatic songs of the robins, the orioles and sweetest of all the bobolink.

  "Oh, winged rapture, feathered soul of spring:
  Blithe voice of woods, fields, waters, all in one,
  Pipe blown through by the warm, mild breath of June,
  Shepherding her white flocks of woolly clouds,
  The bobolink has come, and climbs the wind
  With rippling wings that quiver not for flight
  But only joy, or yielding to its will
  Runs down, a brook of laughter through the air."

After the charm of the novelty of the scene had vanished, I descended from my perch to explore this sleepy hollow: the barn door hung suspended on a single hinge, like a bird with but one unbroken wing to soar upon. The swallows twittered their love-songs under the eaves; chipmunks scolded my intrusion and threw nuts at my head from the beams; a lone, lorn hen proclaimed her triumph over a new laid egg, and then, with fiery eyes, assaulted me with profanity as I filled my hat with her choicest treasures. A litter of pigs scampered away, wedging themselves into a hole in the wall, and hung there kicking and squealing, while their indignant mother chased me up a ladder where she hurled at me the vilest imprecations; a solitary Phoebe bird wailed out her plaintive "pee wee, pee wee, pee whi itt," and a newly-married pair of sandpipers chanted their song of the sea on the edge of a mud puddle in the yard.

At last the infuriated sow went to liberate her wedged-in offspring, leaving me to flee to the house where I cooked my eggs and some ancient potatoes in the ashes of a fire smoldering in the wide old fireplace. I have since eaten royal dinners in palatial hotels, but nothing has ever tasted half as good as this extemporized lunch of my boyhood.

Here the rest of the family found me later when they came bringing their household goods; here I might have laid, broad and deep, the foundations of a useful life, had I possessed even a modicum of the stick-to-itiveness so essential to success.

A limited amount of discontent is a powerful stimulus to more strenuous endeavor; but when you have intensity without continuity of mental action, beware of imitating my example of progressing along the lines of the least resistance; for if you do you will never attain to that persistency of