enough to say that he was a native of New
Hampshire, born of respectable parents, and had received an ordinary
school education with a classic finish by a year at Gilmanton Academy.
After journeying on foot from sunrise till nearly noon of a summer's
day, his weariness and the increasing heat determined him to sit down
in the first convenient shade and await the coming up of the
stage-coach. As if planted on purpose for him, there soon appeared a
little tuft of maples with a delightful recess in the midst, and such
a fresh bubbling spring that it seemed never to have sparkled for any
wayfarer but David Swan. Virgin or not, he kissed it with his thirsty
lips and then flung himself along the brink, pillowing his head upon
some shirts and a pair of pantaloons tied up in a striped cotton
handkerchief. The sunbeams could not reach him; the dust did not yet
rise from the road after the heavy rain of yesterday, and his grassy
lair suited the young man better than a bed of down. The spring
murmured drowsily beside him; the branches waved dreamily across the
blue sky overhead, and a deep sleep, perchance hiding dreams within
its depths, fell upon David Swan. But we are to relate events which he
did not dream of.

While he lay sound asleep in the shade other people were wide awake,
and passed to and fro, afoot, on horseback and in all sorts of
vehicles, along the sunny road by his bedchamber. Some looked neither
to the right hand nor the left and knew not that he was there; some
merely glanced that way without admitting the slumberer among their
busy thoughts; some laughed to see how soundly he slept, and several
whose hearts were brimming full of scorn ejected their venomous
superfluity on David Swan. A middle-aged widow, when nobody else was
near, thrust her head a little way into the recess, and vowed that the
young fellow looked charming in his sleep. A temperance lecturer saw
him, and wrought poor David into the texture of his evening's
discourse as an awful instance of dead drunkenness by the roadside.

But censure, praise, merriment, scorn and indifference were all
one--or, rather, all nothing--to David Swan. He had slept only a few
moments when a brown carriage drawn by a handsome pair of horses
bowled easily along and was brought to a standstill nearly in front of
David's resting-place. A linch-pin had fallen out and permitted one of
the wheels to slide off. The damage was slight and occasioned merely a
momentary alarm