d strong from much
chopping of wood and drawing of water for his mother's washings, and he
was the best swimmer of all those who bathed in the cold, swift mountain
stream which rushes near the schoolhouse. The chief consequence of this
expertness was that in the summer he was forced to teach each succeeding
generation of little boys to swim and dive. They tyrannized over him
unmercifully--as, in fact, everyone did.

Nothing made his mother more furious than such an exhibition of what she
called "Lem's meachin'ness." "Ain't you got no stand-up _in_ ye?" she was
wont to exhort him angrily. "If you don't look out for yourself in this
world, you needn't think anybody else is gunto!"

The instructions in ethics he received at her hands were the only ones he
ever knew, for, up to his fourteenth year, he never had clothes
respectable enough to wear to church, and after that he had other things
to think of. Fourteen years is what we call in our State "over school
age." It was a date to which Mrs. Warren had looked forward with
eagerness. After that, the long, unprofitable months of enforced schooling
would be over, Lem would be earning steady wages, and she could sit back
and "live decent."

It seemed to her more than she could bear, that, almost upon her son's
birthday, she was stricken down with paralysis. It was the first calamity
for which she could not hold her marriage responsible, and her bitterness
thereupon extended itself to fate in general. She cannot have been a
cheerful house-mate during the next ten years, when Lem was growing
silently to manhood.

He was in demand as "help" on the farms about him, on account of his great
strength and faithfulness, although the farmers found him exasperatingly
slow and, when it was a question of animals, not always sure to obey
orders. He could be trusted to be kind to horses, unlike most hired men we
get nowadays, but he never learned "how to get the work out of their
hide." It was his way, on a steep hill with a heavy load, to lay down the
whip, get out, and put his own powerful shoulder to the wheel. If this
failed, he unloaded part of the logs and made two trips of it. The
uncertainty of his progress can be imagined. The busy and impatient farmer
and sawyer at the opposite ends of his route were driven to exhaust their
entire vocabulary of objurgation on him. He was, they used to inform him
in conclusion, "the most _do_-less critter the Lord ever made!"

He was better wit