aft into the depths of the thicket.
The place was in harmony with my thoughts.

I continued on my purposeless voyage till I reached the swollen branch
of the creek. Piled up at a bend of the stream was a heap of logs,
planks, boards, and other fugitive lumber which had come down from the
saw-mills, miles up in the country. I seated myself on this heap of
lumber, to think of the present and the future. I noticed that one end
of a log had been driven ashore by the current, and had caught between
two trees. All the rest of the boards, planks, and timbers had rested
upon this one, and being driven in by the current at the bend, had been
entrapped and held by it.

This fact made me think of myself. My refusal to black Ham's boots the
day before had been the first log, and all my troubles seemed to be
piling themselves up upon it. I thought then, and I think now, that I
had been abused. I was treated like a dog, ordered about like a servant,
and made to do three times as much work as had been agreed with my
guardian. I felt that it was right to resist. There was no one to fight
my battle, and that of my poor sister, but myself. I am well aware that
I took upon myself a great responsibility in deciding this question.
Perhaps, without the counsel of my brother, I should not have dared to
proceed as I did. Bad as the consequences threatened to be, I did not
regret that I had permitted the log to drift ashore.

Again that pine stick seemed like some great vice, sin, or error,
which, having thrown itself up from the current of life, soon gathers
many other vices, sins, and errors around or upon it. As this log had
caught a score of others, so one false step leads to more. The first
glass of liquor, the first step in crime, the first unclean word, were
typified in this stick.

I was not much of a philosopher or moralist then, but it seemed to me
that the entire heap ought to be cleared away; that the whole course of
the river might be choked by it in time, if the obstruction was not
removed. By detaching that first log, all the rest would be cast loose,
and carried away by the stream--just as I had known old Cameron to
become an honest, Christian man by cutting away the log of intemperance.
I was about to use my setting-pole for the purpose of detaching the
obstacle, when I happened to think that the lumber might be saved--just
as the zeal of Paul, in persecuting the Christians, was the same zeal
that did so much to build up th