ze-books and medals. Peter set off to the West.

"The bird in the bush is always out of sight with Peter," said his
mother, whose hair was growing white and her voice feeble. He became a
lawyer, a Congressman. When he made his first speech (on the snags in
the Missouri River) he ran down to Carolina with a copy of it in _The
Congressional Globe_. He had grown portly and red-faced, and talked in a
strident voice. All the towns on his route received him as a conquering
hero. "The Honorable Peter M. Boyer arrived last night," said the
papers, "and received a magnificent public dinner at the ---- Hotel. The
distinguished Senator, one of the favorite sons of the Old North State,
is on his way to visit his parents at their summer retreat in Buncombe
county."

The distinguished and pompous Senator, at home in the hut, walked up
and down with uneasy strides and anxious wandering eyes, just as he had
done when a thin cub of a boy. The Senate Chamber evidently was but as
narrow a cage for this alien beast as the life of a hunter had been.

"I'm not satisfied," he told Hugh and Richard. "Politics are not the
right groove for me. But I'll find it. I know that I have an intellect
different from that of the ordinary man. You can't compare pure gold and
brass, can you? Well, I've tested those fellows at Washington, and they
are brass: they're pot-metal, sir! My brain," tapping his forehead,
"will tell some day on the world: I'll make my mark. I'll hit the bull's
eye yet."

The Senator went back to Iowa. He was not returned for the next term. In
a month or two his mother received a letter from him dated at London.
"When I succeed," he said, "I will come back to you. I have given up
politics and taken to literature. Literature is the only career in which
my brain can reach its full development: all others compress and
constrain me. I shall seek in the Old World for the recognition which
the New did not yield me." All this was Greek to his mother and her
sons, but they knew that it meant that he was gone.

He never came back.

In two years the Honorable Peter was as extinct, so far as the American
Congress, newspapers and people were concerned, as any saurian dead
before the Flood. His mother died. Peter had always been an alien to
her, a perpetual disquiet. But when he was gone the thorn was out of her
flesh. She talked and thought of him as in his babyhood, and left him
her blessing at the last. As year after year crept by, the t