ound it very hard getting along."

"Were yours and father's folks very poor?"

"No; they were in comfortable circumstances."

"Then why, mother, did you come west, and why do we live as we do
now?"

As she did not at once reply, the lad, busy once more with his own
thoughts, forgot that he had asked the question. He had often revolved
the matter in his own mind, but had never before ventured to speak of
it. His mother's conversation with him, after his injury by the gun,
had shown him the folly of his plan of leaving home clandestinely; but
dissatisfaction with his lot grew with his growth and strengthened
with his strength. It was a great mystery to him how his mother could
consent to live so, for so many years. He would look at the black and
crazy loggery, with its clay "chinking," that was ever more cracking,
and crumbling, and falling to the floor, leaving holes between the
logs, through which the wind and rain entered; and the one rickety
chair, and the rude benches and boxes for sitting accommodations, and
the bedsteads, composed of rough oaken slabs, spiked at the head and
side to the walls, and a rough post at the unsupported corner, and the
cracked and rusted stove and leaky funnel; and then he would look at
his mother, who, despite her coarse and dingy dress, seemed so
superior to her condition; and the more he realized the contrast, the
more he marvelled. When he was younger, he had noticed this
incongruity between his gentle mother and her wretched surroundings;
and now he sometimes wished he could be insensible to it, it made him
so unhappy. How restless he became--how like a caged eaglet, as he
pondered the subject by night and by day--none knew save the watchful
friend who moved so gently about the dark-lighted cabin, and kept so
uncomplainingly at her tasks.

And his father seemed to him, in his way, as much of a mystery as his
mother. Was he contented with the roving life he led? and did he never
realize the deprivations of his wife and children? Did father and
mother ever know brighter days? and were they never to see them again?
And was it duty for him to keep on in the same way, sacrificing every
rising aspiration and pure taste, and getting nothing in return but
poor food and clothing, a comfortless home, and a mind undeveloped and
unfurnished?

Seated on the end of a box, shelling corn by drawing the ears against
the back of a broken scythe, he had been working and thinking through
the even