in a leave of absence just before Bunker Hill,
and had begun his new life with her in Old Newbury in Massachusetts, at
a time when there was little opening for him,--or for any man who had
spent seven years in learning how to do well what was never to be done
again.

And in doing what there was to do he had not succeeded. He had just
squeezed pork and potatoes and Indian meal enough out of a worn-out farm
to keep Sybil, his wife, and their growing family of children alive. He
had, once or twice, gone up to Boston to find what chances might be open
for him there. But, alas, Boston was in a bad way too, as well as Samuel
Cutts. Once he had joined some old companions, who had gone out to the
Western Reserve in Northern Ohio, to see what opening might be there.
But the outlook seemed unfavorable for carrying so far, overland, a
delicate woman and six little children into a wilderness. If he could
have scraped together a little money, he said, he would buy a share in
one of the ships he saw rotting in Boston or Salem, and try some
foreign adventure. But, alas! the ships would not have been rotting had
it been easy for any man to scrape together a little money to buy them.
And so, year in and year out, Samuel Cutts and his wife dressed the
children more and more plainly, bought less sugar and more molasses,
brought down the family diet more strictly to pork and beans, pea-soup,
hasty-pudding, and rye-and-indian,--and Samuel Cutts looked more and
more sadly on the prospect before these boys and girls, and the life for
which he was training them.

Do not think that he was a profligate, my dear cousin Eunice, because he
had bought a lottery ticket. Please to observe that to buy lottery
tickets was represented to be as much the duty of all good citizens, as
it was proved to be, eleven years ago, your duty to make Havelocks and
to knit stockings. Samuel Cutts, in the outset, had bought his lottery
ticket only "to encourage the others," and to do his honorable share in
paying the war debt. Then, I must confess, he had thought more of the
ticket than he had supposed he would. The children had made a romance
about it,--what they would do, and what they would not do, if they drew
the first prize. Samuel Cutts and Sybil Cutts themselves had got drawn
into the interest of the children, and many was the night when they had
sat up, without any light but that of a pine-torch, planning out the
details of the little colony they would form