h
plaster, and capped by a roof. This, windowed, swept and garnished,
with a central fireplace wherein two fires could flame and roar, was
the log-cabin. This was home. The hired builders had protested against
its primitive form; they sighed for a snug frame house, French roof and
bay windows. "'Ware the cold!" was their daily croak.

"We'll live in fur and toughen ourselves," said Ernest Hume. And
turning to his boy that night, when they sat together by their own
fire, he asked,--

"Shall we fashion our muscles into steel, our skin into armor? Shall we
make our eyes strong enough to face the sun by day, and pure enough to
meet the chilly stars at night? Shall we have Nature for our only love?
Tell me, sir!"

And Francis, who hung upon his father's voice, even when the words were
beyond him, answered, "Yes, father, please!" and went on feeding birch
strips to the fire, where they turned from vellum to mysterious missals
blazoned by an unseen hand.

The idyl continued unbroken for twelve years. Yet it was not wholly
idyllic, for, even with money multiplying for them out in the world,
there were hard personal conditions against which they had to fight.
Ernest Hume delighted in the fierceness of the winter wind, the cold
resistance of the snow; cut off, as he honestly felt himself to be,
from spiritual growth, he had great joy in strengthening his physical
being until it waxed into insolent might. Francis, too, took so happily
to the stern yet lovely phases of their life that his father never
thought of possible wrong to him in so shaping his early years. As for
Ernest Hume, he had bound himself the more irrevocably to right living
by renouncing artificial bonds. He had removed his son from the world,
and he had thereby taken upon himself the necessity of becoming a
better world. Therefore he did not allow himself in any sense to rust
out. He did a colossal amount of mental burnishing; and, a gentleman by
nature, he adopted a daily purity of speech and courtesy of manner
which were less like civilized life than the efflorescence of chivalry
at its best. He had chosen for himself a part; by his will, a Round
Table sprang up in the woods, though two knights only were to hold
counsel there.

The conclusion of the story--so far as a story is ever concluded--must
be found in the words of Francis Hume. Before he was twenty, his
strength began stirring within him, and he awoke, not to any definite
discontent, but to that f