omitable will of man has won
from the wilderness a living and a home.

[Illustration: Birth-place Of Willard Glazier.]

CHAPTER II.

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD OF WILLARD GLAZIER.

The infant stranger.--A mother's prayers.--"Be just before you are
generous."--Careful training.--Willard Glazier's first battle.--A
narrow escape.--Facing the foe.--The happy days of
childhood.--"The boy is father to the man."

The Glazier Homestead, as we have said, is upon the main road leading
from Little York to Fullerville. It is a substantial and comfortable
farm-house, with no pretension to architectural beauty, but,
nevertheless, is a sightly object in a pleasant landscape. Standing back
two hundred feet from the road, in a grove of gigantic elms, with a
limpid brook of spring water a short distance to the right, and rich
fields of herd grass stretching off rearwards towards the waters of the
Oswegatchie, which hurry along on their journey of forty miles to the
St. Lawrence River, the old house is sure to attract the attention of
the traveller, and to be long remembered as a picture of solid and
substantial comfort.

In this old house, upon the morning of August twenty-second, 1841, to
Ward Glazier and Mehitable, his wife, a son was born who was
subsequently named Willard. The father and mother were by no means
sentimental people--they were certainly not given to seeing the poetical
side of life; they were plain, earnest people, rough hewn out of the
coarse fibre of Puritanism, but the advent of this little child brought
a joy to their hearts that had its softening influence upon the home in
which he was to be reared.

The thoroughness of Ward Glazier's nature, that conscientiousness in
excess which made him radical in all things, was of the _heart_ as well
as of the head, and though not a demonstrative man, the intensity of his
paternal love cropped out in many ways. As to his wife, hers was truly
"mother's love." And what notes are there attuned to sacred music, in
all the broad vocabulary of the English tongue, which gives any idea of
the sentiment that links a woman to her babe, except the three simple
syllables, "mother's love!" Brooding over the tiny stranger, ready to
laugh or cry; exultant with hope and pride, despondent with fear,
quivering with anguish if the "wind of heaven doth visit its cheek too
roughly," and singing hosannas of joy when it lisps the simpler
syllables that she so patiently has