relaxing face.

"I am more careful of my promises than that," she answered.
"But, Winthrop, my boy, what do you want to do first?"

"To learn, mamma!" he said, with a singular flash of fire in
his usual cool eye. "To get rid of ignorance, and then to get
the power that knowledge gives. Rufus said the other day that
knowledge is power, and I know he was right. I feel like a man
with his hands tied, because I am so ignorant."

"You are hardly a man yet, Winthrop; you are only a boy in
years."

"I am almost sixteen, mother, and I haven't taken the first
step yet."

What should the first step be? A question in the minds of
both; the answer -- a blank.

"How long have you been thinking of this?"

"Since last spring, mother."

"Didn't Will's going put it in your head?"

"That gave me the first thought; but it would have made no
difference, mother; it would have come, sooner or later. I
know it would, by my feeling ever since."

Mrs. Landholm's eye wandered round the room, the very walls in
their humbleness and roughness reminding her anew of the
labour and self-denial it had cost to rear them, and then to
furnish them, and that was now expended in keeping the inside
warm. Every brown beam and little window-sash could witness
the story of privation and struggle, if she would let her mind
go back to it; the associations were on every hand; neither
was the struggle over. She turned her back upon the room, and
sitting down in Winthrop's chair bent her look as he had done
into the decaying bed of coals.

He was standing in the shadow of the mantelpiece, and looking
down in his turn scanned her face and countenance as a little
while before she had scanned his. Hers was a fine face, in
some of the finest indications. It had not, probably it never
had, the extreme physical beauty of her first-born, nor the
mark of intellect that was upon the features of the second.
But there was the unmistakable writing of calm good sense, a
patient and possessed mind, a strong power for the right,
whether doing or suffering, a pure spirit; and that nameless
beauty, earthly and unearthly, which looks out of the eyes of
a mother; a beauty like which there is none. But more; toil's
work, and care's, were there, very plain, on the figure and on
the face, and on the countenance too; he could not overlook
it; work that years had not had time to do, nor sorrow
permission. His heart smote him.

"Mamma," he said, "you have left out the h