oo young
to show what I can do and be. She waited to see, for years. The
intention may not have been conscious, but I believe it was there! And
then she got tired of waiting. Why, it began to look as though I would
never do anything or be anybody! Great Caesar! You can't expect a girl to
marry an egg in hopes o' what it'll hatch. O let me make haste and show
what I am! what I can--'Evermind, Israel, I see you. Just wait till we
get this crop gathered; if I don't kick you two idle, blundering,
wasting, pilfering black renters off this farm--as shore's a gun's iron!

"No, she and Jeff-Jack'll never marry. Even if they do he'll not live
long. These political editors, if somebody doesn't kill 'em, they break
down, all at once. Our difference in age will count for less and less
every year. She's the kind that stays young; four years from now I'll
look the older of the two--I'll work myself old!"

A vision came to the dreamer's fancy: Widewood's forests filled with
thrifty settlers, mines opened, factories humming by the brooksides, the
locomotive's whistle piercing the stony ears of the Sleeping Giant; Suez
full of iron-ore, coal, and quarried stone, and Fannie a widow, or
possibly still unwed, charmed by his successes, touched by his
constancy, and realizing at last the true nature of what she had all
along felt as only a friendship.

"That's it! If I give men good reason to court me, I'll get the woman I
court!"--But he did not, for many weeks, give men any irresistible good
reason to court him.

"Ah me! here's November gone. Talk of minutes slipping through the
fingers--the months are as bad as the minutes! Lord! what a difference
there is between planning a thing and doing it--or even beginning to do
it!"

Yet he did begin. There is a season comes, sooner or later, to all of
us, when we must love and love must nest. It may fix its choice
irrationally on some sweet ineligible Fannie; but having chosen, there
it must nest, spite of all. Now, men may begin life not thus moved; but
I never knew a man thus moved who still did not begin life. Love being
kindled, purpose is generated, and the wheels in us begin to go round.
They had gone round, even in John's father; but not only were time,
place, and circumstance against the older man, but his love had nested
in so narrow a knot-hole that the purposes and activities of his gentle
soul died in their prison.

"Yes, that's one thing I've got to look out for," mused John on