t the struggle: the marshalling to the front of rightful
forces--will, effort, endurance, devotion; the putting resolutely back
of forces wrongful; the hardening of all that is soft within, the
softening of all that is hard: until out of the hardening and the
softening results the better tempering of the soul's metal, and higher
development of those two qualities which are best in man and best in
his ideal of his Maker--strength and kindness, power and mercy. With an
added reward also, if the struggle lead you to perceive (what he did
not perceive), as the light of your darkness, the sweet of bitter, that
real struggling is itself real living, and that no ennobling thing of
this earth is ever to be had by man on any other terms: so teaching
him, none too soon, that any divine end is to be reached but through
divine means, that a great work requires a great preparation.

Of the lad's desperate experience henceforth in mere outward matters
the recital may be suppressed: the struggle of the earth's poor has
grown too common to make fresh reading. He toiled direfully, economized
direfully, to get to his college, but in this showed only the heroism
too ordinary among American boys to be marvelled at more. One fact may
be set down, as limning some true figure of him on the landscape of
those years in that peculiar country.

The war had just closed. The farmers, recollecting the fortunes made in
hemp before, had hurried to the fields. All the more as the long
interruption of agriculture in the South had resulted in scarcity of
cotton; so that the earnest cry came to Kentucky for hemp at once to
take many of its places. But meantime the slaves had been set free:
where before ordered, they must now be hired. A difficult agreement to
effect at all times, because will and word and bond were of no account.
Most difficult when the breaking of hemp was to be bargained for; since
the laborer is kept all day in the winter fields, away from the
fireside, and must toil solitary at his brake, cut off from the talk
and laughter which lighten work among that race. So that wages rose
steadily, and the cost of hemp with them.

The lad saw in this demand for the lowest work at the highest prices
his golden opportunity--and seized it. When the hemp-breaking season
opened that winter, he made his appearance on the farm of a rich farmer
near by, taking his place with the negroes.

There is little art in breaking hemp. He soon had the knack of