amily being industrious and
obliging, they soon began to gather little comforts around them; and
as these were not embittered by the cold looks and insulting sneers
of the neighbourhood, they were comparatively happy for a time. But
even here there was for them no permanent place of rest. A traveller
passing through Norristown, on his way from the capital to the Blue
Mountains, recognised Sparks, and told somebody he knew that he
wished the community joy of having added to the number of its
inhabitants the notorious locksmith of Philadelphia. The news soon
spread. The family found that they were shunned as they had formerly
been by those who had known them longer than the good people of
Norristown, and had a fair prospect of starvation opening before
them. They removed again. This time there was no inducement to
linger, for they had no local attachments to detain them. They
crossed the mountains, and, descending into the vale of the
Susquehanna, pitched their tent at Sunbury. Here the same temporary
success excited the same hopes, only to be blighted in the bud by the
breath of slander, which seemed so widely circulated as to leave them
hardly any asylum within the limits of the State. We need not
enumerate the different towns and villages in which they essayed to
gain a livelihood, and failed. They had nearly crossed the State in
its whole length, been driven from Pittsburg, and were slowly wending
their way further west, and were standing on the high ground
overlooking Middleton, as though doubtful if there was to be rest for
the soles of their feet even there. They hesitated to try a new
experiment. Sparks seated himself on a stone beneath a spreading
sycamore--his family clustered around him on the grass: they had
travelled far, and were weary, and, without speaking a word, as their
eyes met, and thinking of their prolonged sufferings and slender
hopes, they burst into a flood of tears, in which Sparks, burying his
face in the golden locks of the sweet girl who bowed her head upon
his knee, joined audibly. At length, wiping away his tears, and
checking the rising sobs that shook his manly bosom--'God's will be
done, my children,' said the locksmith; 'we cannot help weeping, but
let us not murmur. If we are to be wanderers and fugitives on the
earth, let us never lose sight of the promise which assures us of an
eternal refuge in a place where the wicked cease from troubling and
the weary are at rest. I was perhaps to