ng the little house a comfortable
and even beautiful home for her. Then he prepared the neglected bit of
ground around it for a garden and took pleasure in doing it. It was
work which he liked, and which he knew how to do, but it put nothing
into the family purse, which was getting low, and something must be done
to replenish it.

He worked for a few weeks in harvest in the narrow fields of Peter
Gilchrist, and to good purpose, though the work was new to him; and he
made friends with Peter himself, which was something. But the harvest
wore over and winter was coming on, and then he wrote to Jamie Dunn, his
first friend, saying he was now ready and willing to go wherever he
should be sent.

But in his heart he knew that for the only work which was left to him to
do, he was neither ready nor willing, nor for the kind of life which he
saw stretching a long, weary way before him.

He could do as his father had done before him, he told his mother
cheerfully, and who had done better than he? But to himself he owned
that this was to be doubted. He could never do as his father had done;
he was not the man his father had been, or he could never have played
the fool, wasting his time and losing his opportunities, as he had done.
He had been spoiled with softness, with idle days, and the pleasant
things of life, which he could not forget, and which, like a weakling,
he was in his secret heart longing for still. And even his father had
not won what men called success, and a firm footing among his fellows,
till the best part of his life was over.

But his father had been content through all his days as they came, and
with his day's work and his day's wages. And his father had known his
own strength and could bide his time. As for his son, John told himself
that he was neither strong nor wise. He knew, or he feared at this
time, that only the thought of his mother and her need of him kept him
from despair.

He called it despair, poor lad, not knowing what he said. The depths of
despair came to him with the thought of enlisting as a common soldier,
to go away and live his life with as little exercise of his own will as
the musket he carried, and to death and a nameless grave. Or it meant
to sail away before the mast, a slave to some tyrant who held the power
of life and death, because he held the power of the lash. And it might
have come to one or other of these possibilities with him, if it had not
been for his moth