difficult not to get a harvest from the seed sown than to get one. The
rows of hills were covered with the bountiful returns brought up to
the light of day by Tom's well-used hoe. It was not, however, the
size, quality, or number of the potatoes that most interested Tom just
then. The fact that they were all out of the ground; that the corn was
cut and stacked, and the pumpkins ready to be housed; that the fall
work could be finished by that afternoon's sun-setting,--stirred him
strangely; for he had of late begun to question the future, to learn
what it had in store for him. He had come to realize, in a degree,
that that future would be very much what he chose to make it. And
serious dissatisfaction with the past and the present filled his heart
with disquiet.

Tom's memory had been active for a few days. How like yesterday it
seemed, when he was a little child, and his father, getting together
money enough, bought a horse and wagon, and, putting the family in the
vehicle, started out prospecting for a new home farther from the
advancing waves of civilization! How many similar expeditions had
they taken since, and how painfully had their experiences illustrated
the saying, "A rolling stone gathers no moss"! But roll Mr. Jones
would. Tom knew this too well. It was, indeed, viewed in one aspect,
an easy way to get on, this going in one's own conveyance from place
to place of Uncle Sam's unsettled lands; this living off the country,
gypsying in the woods and on the prairies; this two thirds savage and
one third civilized mode of putting a growing family through the
world; and if you were to see Mr. Jones seated in the emigrant wagon,
reins in hand and pipe in mouth, or with shouldered rifle on the track
of a deer, you would say that such a life was eminently agreeable to
him. Every man is made for something; and you would say that he was
cut out for a wandering frontier loafer, who gets his subsistence by
doing the least possible work in the easiest possible manner, and
hunting and fishing. A horse and wagon, or extemporized log cabin, for
a shelter; tools enough for the simplest tilling of the soil, and
furniture for the rudest housekeeping and clothing; the making over,
by the industrious wife, of clothes bought "some time back,"--such was
the way the Joneses lived. Putting up a small log house by the bank of
a river for the sake of the fish, and near a forest for the game, with
"a strip of clean prairie" for "garden sa