everenced, without ability fully to comprehend, her exalted
religious fervor and the quietude of soul that it brought. But he did not
know through how many silent conflicts, how many prayers, how many tears,
how many hopes resigned and sorrows welcomed, she had come into that last
refuge of sorrowful souls, that immovable peace when all life's anguish
ceases and the will of God becomes the final rest.

But, unhappily for this present crisis, there was, as there often is in
family life, just enough of the father's nature in the son to bring them
into collision with each other. James had the same nervously anxious
nature, the same intense feeling of responsibility, the same tendency
towards morbid earnestness; and on that day there had come collision.

His father had poured forth upon him his fears and apprehensions in a
manner which implied a censure on his son, as being willing to accept a
life of scholarly ease while his father and mother were, as he expressed
it, "working their lives away."

"But I tell you, father, as God is my witness, I _mean_ to pay all; you
shall not suffer; interest and principal--all that my work would bring--I
engage to pay back."

"You!--you'll never have anything! You'll be a poor man as long as you
live. Lost the Academy this Fall--that tells the story!"

"But, father, it wasn't my fault that I lost the Academy."

"It's no matter whose fault it was--that's neither here nor there--you
lost it, and here you are with the vacation before you and nothing to do!
There's your mother, she's working herself to death; she never gets any
rest. I expect she'll go off in a consumption one of these days."

"There, there, father! that's enough! Please don't say any more. You'll
see I _will_ find something to do!"

There are words spoken at times in life that do not sound bitter though
they come from a pitiable depth of anguish, and as James turned from his
father he had taken a resolution that convulsed him with pain; his strong
arms quivered with the repressed agony, and he hastily sought a distant
part of the field, and began cutting and stacking corn-stalks with a
nervous energy.

"Why, ye work like thunder!" was Biah's comment. "Book l'arnin' hain't
spiled ye yet; your arms are good for suthin'."

"Yes, my arms are good for something, and I'll use them for something,"
said Jim.

There was raging a tempest in his soul. For a young fellow of a Puritan
education in those days to be angry with