acrifice his hopes of education, his man's
ambition, his love, his home and family, and become a wanderer on the
face of the earth. How this befell requires a sketch of character.

Deacon Silas Pitkin was a fair specimen of a class of men not uncommon in
New England--men too sensitive for the severe physical conditions of New
England life, and therefore both suffering and inflicting suffering. He
was a man of the finest moral traits, of incorruptible probity, of
scrupulous honor, of an exacting conscientiousness, and of a sincere
piety. But he had begun life with nothing; his whole standing in the
world had been gained inch by inch by the most unremitting economy and
self-denial, and he was a man of little capacity for hope, of whom it was
said, in popular phraseology, that he "took things hard." He was never
sanguine of good, always expectant of evil, and seemed to view life like
a sentinel forbidden to sleep and constantly under arms.

For such a man to be harassed by a mortgage upon his homestead was a
steady wear and drain upon his vitality. There were times when a positive
horror of darkness came down upon him--when his wife's untroubled,
patient hopefulness seemed to him like recklessness, when the smallest
item of expense was an intolerable burden, and the very daily bread of
life was full of bitterness; and when these paroxysms were upon him, one
of the heaviest of his burdens was the support of his son in college. It
was true that he was proud of his son's talents and sympathized with his
love for learning--he had to the full that sense of the value of
education which is the very vital force of the New England mind--and in
an hour when things looked brighter to him he had given his consent to
the scheme of a college education freely.

James was industrious, frugal, energetic, and had engaged to pay the most
of his own expenses by teaching in the long winter vacations. But
unfortunately this year the Mapleton Academy, which had been promised to
him for the winter term, had been taken away by a little maneuver of
local politics and given to another, thus leaving him without resource.
This disappointment, coming just at the time when the yearly interest
upon the mortgage was due, had brought upon his father one of those
paroxysms of helpless gloom and discouragement in which the very world
itself seemed clothed in sack-cloth.

From the time that he heard the Academy was gone, Deacon Silas lay awake
nights in th