at would be
a noble pedestal for a man's statue!'

'It is better to sit here by this fire,' answered the girl, blushing,
'and be comfortable and contented, though nobody thinks about us.'

'I suppose,' Said her father, after a fit of musing, 'there is
something natural in what the young man says; and if my mind had been
turned that way, I might have felt just the same. It is strange, wife,
how his talk has set my head running on things that are pretty certain
never to come to pass.'

'Perhaps they may,' observed the wife. 'Is the man thinking what he will
do when he is a widower?'

'No, no!' cried he, repelling the idea with reproachful kindness. 'When
I think of your death, Esther, I think of mine, too. But I was wishing
we had a good farm in Bartlett, or Bethlehem, or Littleton, or some
other township round the White Mountains; but not where they could
tumble on our heads. I should want to stand well with my neighbors and
be called Squire, and sent to General Court for a term or two; for a
plain, honest man may do as much good there as a lawyer. And when I
should be grown quite an old man, and you an old woman, so as not to be
long apart, I might die happy enough in my bed, and leave you all
crying around me. A slate gravestone would suit me as well as a marble
one--with just my name and age, and a verse of a hymn, and something to
let people know that I lived an honest man and died a Christian.'

'There now!' exclaimed the stranger; 'it is our nature to desire a
monument, be it slate or marble, or a pillar of granite, or a glorious
memory in the universal heart of man.'

'We're in a strange way, tonight,' said the wife, with tears in her
eyes. 'They say it's a sign of something, when folks' minds go a
wandering so. Hark to the children!'

They listened accordingly. The younger children had been put to bed in
another room, but with an open door between, so that they could be heard
talking busily among themselves. One and all seemed to have caught the
infection from the fireside circle, and were outvying each other in wild
wishes, and childish projects of what they would do when they came to
be men and women. At length a little boy, instead of addressing his
brothers and sisters, called out to his mother.

'I'll tell you what I wish, mother,' cried he. 'I want you and father
and grandma'm, and all of us, and the stranger too, to start right away,
and go and take a drink out of the basin of the Flume!'

Nobod