n, wizened, restless as a strange beast in a cage, though his
brothers tirelessly puzzled their slow brains to soothe and satisfy him.
When he was a boy he was wretched because he was not taken down into the
valley or to far-off towns. His brothers were puzzled, dismayed.

"It is the bird in the bush he wants," said his shrewd old mother. "The
bird in the bush: he will never get it in his hand."

When he was a boy of ten a party of geologists stopped at the log hut.
There was much talk among them of the cities, of science and of
politics. Peter Boyer thought he had found his bird in the bush.

"I must have an education, and a good one, mother," he said.

He was sent to Raleigh to school. Reports came home that no such boy had
ever been taught there. His fellow-students prophesied that Carolina
would some day be proud of her gifted son. Up in the mountains the two
brothers ploughed, trapped, dug ginseng and climbed the peaks for balsam
with hot, steady zeal to earn the little money which was needed to pay
for his schooling. The bare cabin grew barer, mother and brothers went
hungry many a day, but the pittance was always saved and sent to him.

The boy came home in vacations with his moustache, his gorgeous
scarf-pin and his quick, eager talk: he brought, too, piles of gilded
prize-books, and once a silver medal. He did not care much for books or
medal, but Richard wrapped each one carefully in paper and packed them
in the big chest, and when the boy was gone the two broad-shouldered men
would take them out at night and turn them over, and sometimes spell out
a page, with a grave awe and delight.

Presently, the lad sent back their money: he was pushing his own
way--into college, into the University of Virginia, finally--great and
culminating triumph!--into the newspapers. Poems (after Poe, as a matter
of course), political diatribes in Johnsonese periods in _De Bow's
Review_, essays, criticisms,--nothing came amiss to him.

The young man's mind was of that flabby but fidgety kind which throws
off ideas as a crab its shells, one after another--useless, imperfect
moulds of itself. He came home to the mountain-hut in the first flush
and triumph of authorship, bringing every newspaper-clipping in his
pocket-book wherein a mention of his name had appeared. Richard, Hugh
and his mother were never tired of hearing nor he of reading them. The
poems and the clippings were left to be stored away--sacred relics--with
the pri