to his half-frantic outpourings of longing to escape from the dark, narrow
valley where his fathers had lived their dark, narrow lives.

The day before he went back to his own home, now so strange to him, he was
out with her, searching for some lost turkey-chicks, and found one with
its foot caught in a tangle of rusty wire. The little creature had beaten
itself almost to death in its struggle to get away. Kneeling in the grass,
and feeling the wild palpitations of its heart under his rescuing hand, he
had called to his sister, "Oh, look! Poor thing! It's 'most dead, and yet
it ain't really hurt a mite, only desperate, over bein' held fast." His
voice broke in a sudden wave of sympathy: "Oh, ain't it _terrible_ to feel
so!"

For a moment the young mother put her little son aside and looked at her
brother with brooding eyes. A little later she said with apparent
irrelevance, "Jehiel, as soon as you're a man grown, I'll help you to get
off. You shall be a sailor, if you like, and go around the world, and
bring back coral to baby and me."

A chilling premonition fell on the lad. "I don't believe it!" he said,
with tears in his eyes. "I just believe I've got to stay here in this hole
all my life."

His sister looked off at the tops of the trees. Finally, "Surely He shall
deliver thee from the snare of the fowler," she quoted dreamily.

When she came to see him and their parents a few months later, she brought
him a little square of crimson silk, on which she had worked in tiny
stitches, "Surely He shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler." She
explained to her father and mother that it was a "text-ornament" for
Jehiel to hang up over his desk; but she drew the boy aside and showed him
that the silk was only lightly caught down to the foundation.

"Underneath is another text," she said, "and when your day of freedom
comes I want you should promise me to cut the stitches, turn back the
silk, and take the second text for your motto, so you'll remember to be
properly grateful. This is the second text." She put her hands on his
shoulders and said in a loud, exultant voice, "My soul is escaped as a
bird out of the snare of the fowler. The snare is broken and I am
escaped."

For answer the boy pulled her eagerly to the window and pointed to a young
pine-tree that stood near the house.

"Sister, that tree's just as old as I be. I've prayed to God, and I've
promised myself that before it's as tall, as the ridge-pole