while he was treading it. But when posterity
should gaze back into the gloom of what was now the present, they
would trace the brightness of his footsteps, brightening as meaner
glories faded, and confess that a gifted one had passed from his
cradle to his tomb with none to recognize him.

"As yet," cried the stranger, his cheek glowing and his eye flashing
with enthusiasm--"as yet I have done nothing. Were I to vanish from
the earth to-morrow, none would know so much of me as you--that a
nameless youth came up at nightfall from the valley of the Saco, and
opened his heart to you in the evening, and passed through the Notch
by sunrise, and was seen no more. Not a soul would ask, 'Who was he?
Whither did the wanderer go?' But I cannot die till I have achieved my
destiny. Then let Death come: I shall have built my monument."

There was a continual flow of natural emotion gushing forth amid
abstracted reverie which enabled the family to understand this young
man's sentiments, though so foreign from their own. With quick
sensibility of the ludicrous, he blushed at the ardor into which he
had been betrayed.

"You laugh at me," said he, taking the eldest daughter's hand and
laughing himself. "You think my ambition as nonsensical as if I were
to freeze myself to death on the top of Mount Washington only that
people might spy at me from the country roundabout. And truly that
would be a noble pedestal for a man's statue."

"It is better to sit here by this fire," answered the girl, blushing,
"and be comfortable and contented, though nobody thinks about us."

"I suppose," said her father, after a fit of musing, "there is
something natural in what the young man says; and if my mind had been
turned that way, I might have felt just the same.--It is strange,
wife, how his talk has set my head running on things that are pretty
certain never to come to pass."

"Perhaps they may," observed the wife. "Is the man thinking what he
will do when he is a widower?"

"No, no!" cried he, repelling the idea with reproachful kindness.
"When I think of your death, Esther, I think of mine too. But I was
wishing we had a good farm in Bartlett or Bethlehem or Littleton, or
some other township round the White Mountains, but not where they
could tumble on our heads. I should want to stand well with my
neighbors and be called squire and sent to General Court for a term or
two; for a plain, honest man may do as much good there as a lawyer.
And w