bitterness of Samuel's life; for he knew that within old Ephraim's
bosom was the heart of a king. Once the boy had heard him in the room
beneath his attic, talking with one of the boarders, a widow with a
little daughter of whom the old man was fond. "I've had a feeling,
ma'am," he was saying, "that somehow you might be in trouble. And I
wanted to say that if you can't spare this money, I would rather you
kept it; for I don't need it now, and you can send it to me when
things are better with you." That was Ephraim Prescott's way with his
boarders; and so he did not grow in riches as fast as he grew in soul.
Ephraim's wife had taught him to read the Bible. He read it every
night, and on Sundays also; and if what he was reading was sublime
poetry, and a part of the world's best literature, the old man did not
know it. He took it all as having actual relationship to such matters
as trading horses and feeding boarders. And he taught Samuel to take
it that way also; and as the boy grew up there took root within him a
great dismay and perplexity, that these moral truths which he read in
the Book seemed to count for so little in the world about him.
Besides the Bible and his mother, Ephraim taught his son one other
great thing; that was America. America was Samuel's country, the land
where his fathers had died. It was a land set apart from all others,
for the working out of a high and wonderful destiny. It was the land
of Liberty. For this whole armies of heroic men had poured out their
heart's blood; and their dream was embodied in institutions which were
almost as sacred as the Book itself. Samuel learned hymns which dealt
with these things, and he heard great speeches about them; every
Fourth of July that he could remember he had driven out to the
courthouse to hear one, and he was never in the least ashamed when the
tears came into his eyes.
He had seen tears even in the summer boarders' eyes; once or twice
when on a quiet evening it chanced that the old man unlocked the
secret chambers of his soul. For Ephraim Prescott had been through the
War. He had marched with the Seventeenth Pennsylvania from Bull Run to
Cold Harbor, where he had been three times wounded; and his memory was
a storehouse of mighty deeds and thrilling images. Heroic figures
strode through it; there were marches and weary sieges, prison and
sickness and despair; there were moments of horror and of glory,
visions of blood and anguish, of flame and cannon smoke; there were
battle flags, torn by shot and shell, and names of precious memory,
which stirred the deep places of the soul. These men had given their
lives for Freedom; they had lain down to make a pathway before her--
they had filled up a bloody chasm so that she might pass upon her way.
And that was the heritage they handed to their children, to guard and
cherish. That was what it meant to be an American; that one must hold
himself in readiness to go forth as they had done, and dare and suffer
whatever the fates might send.
Such were the things out of which Samuel's life was made; besides
these he had only the farm, with its daily tasks, and the pageant of
Nature in the wilderness--of day and night, and of winter and summer
upon the mountains. The books were few. There was one ragged volume
which Samuel knew nearly by heart, which told the adventures of a
castaway upon a desert island, and how, step by step, he solved his
problem; Samuel learned from that to think of life as made by honest
labor, and to find a thrill of romance in the making of useful things.
And then there was the story of Christian, and of his pilgrimage; the
very book for a Seeker--with visions of glory not too definite,