life a success, and he was just as
thoroughly determined that any success which might crown his efforts
should be shared by his parents. It is true that the road looked long
and the path rough, but he had a "heart for any fate," and his courage
never failed. A substitute at the plow he knew he could obtain for a
small sum, and the board of such a person would take the place of his
own at the home table, and he never doubted that he could earn a
sufficient surplus to pay the wages of such an assistant. At all events
he made up his mind to try the experiment.

With young Willard, to think was to act, and this project was no sooner
conceived than he proceeded to put it into execution. He laid his plans
frankly before his father, who, to his great gratification, assented to
his proposal. A man was hired for fifteen dollars a month to take
Willard's place on the farm, and the latter made his first venture as a
trapper.

His initial experiment was to set six traps of the pattern called a
"dead-fall" or "figure of four," and this resulted in the capture of two
minks worth about eight dollars. With what an exultant heart he drew out
his first mink and realized that by his own unaided exertions he had
made some money, no boy or man need be told. He at once, however,
entered into some rather fallacious calculations and built some
extremely airy castles. It occurred to him that if out of six traps he
could obtain two skins, out of one hundred he could obtain thirty-three,
and so on, in proportion.

This, however, proved to be a miscalculation, it not being so much the
number of traps set, as the quantity of game in a given locality which
regulates the amount of success for a trapper. Yet his efforts in this
new business succeeded to a gratifying degree, and the fact of having
exchanged the dull monotony of farm drudgery for the exhilarating
excitement of a hunter's life, was in itself a sufficient reward for any
amount of exertion. Indeed what mode of life could be happier or more
free, for a healthy, strong-limbed youth of fifteen, than to live as he
then did, almost entirely in the woods? Then too, his daily route lay in
the midst of some of the finest scenery to be found anywhere in New
York, even in that grand old county of St. Lawrence.

To a lover of nature nothing could be more alluring than the locality
through which Willard, at that period of his life, trapped and hunted.
To follow the winding waters of the Oswegatch