e most beloved
should be leaving its ancestral home to go to a far, new country of which
little was known. We might also have heard Samson answer:

"It's awful easy to be happy here. We slide along in the same old groove,
that our fathers traveled, from Vergennes to Paradise. We work and play
and go to meetin' and put a shin plaster in the box and grow old and
narrow and stingy and mean and go up to glory and are turned into saints
and angels. Maybe that's the best thing that could happen to us, but
Sarah and I kind o' thought we'd try a new starting place and another
route to Heaven."

Then we might have seen the countenance of the minister assume a grave
and troubled look. "Samson, you must not pull down the pillars of this
temple," he said.

"No, it has done too much for me. I love its faults even. But we have
been called and must go. A great empire is growing up in the West. We
want to see it; we want to help build it."

The minister had acquired a sense of humor among those Yankees. Years
later in his autobiography he tells how deeply the words of Samson had
impressed him. He had answered:

"Think of us. I don't know what we shall do without your fun and the
music of your laugh at the pleasure parties. In addition to being the
best wrestler in the parish you are also its most able and sonorous
laugher."

"Yes, Sarah and I have got the laughing habit. I guess we need a touch
of misery to hold us down. But you will have other laughers. The seed has
been planted here and the soil is favorable."

Samson knew many funny stories and could tell them well. His heart was as
merry as _The Fisher's Hornpipe_. He used to say that he got the violin
to help him laugh, as he found his voice failing under the strain.

Sarah and Samson had been raised on adjoining farms just out of the
village. He had had little schooling, but his mind was active and well
inclined. Sarah had prosperous relatives in Boston and had had the
advantage of a year's schooling in that city. She was a comely girl of
a taste and refinement unusual in the place and time of her birth. Many
well favored youths had sought her hand, but, better than others, she
liked the big, masterful, good-natured, humorous Samson, crude as he was.
Naturally in her hands his timber had undergone some planing and
smoothing and his thought had been gently led into new and pleasant
ways. Sarah's Uncle Rogers in Boston had kept them supplied with some of
the best books an