ole life, indeed, had been a
solitary path; for, with the lofty caution of his nature, he had kept
himself apart from those who might otherwise have been his companions.
The family, too, though so kind and hospitable, had that consciousness
of unity among themselves, and separation from the world at large,
which, in every domestic circle, should still keep a holy place where no
stranger may intrude. But this evening a prophetic sympathy impelled
the refined and educated youth to pour out his heart before the simple
mountaineers, and constrained them to answer him with the same free
confidence. And thus it should have been. Is not the kindred of a common
fate a closer tie than that of birth?

The secret of the young man's character was a high and abstracted
ambition. He could have borne to live an undistinguished life, but not
to be forgotten in the grave. Yearning desire had been transformed
to hope; and hope, long cherished, had become like certainty,
that, obscurely as he journeyed now, a glory was to beam on all his
pathway--though not, perhaps, while he was treading it. But when
posterity should gaze back into the gloom of what was now the present,
they would trace the brightness of his footsteps, brightening as meaner
glories faded, and confess that a gifted one had passed from his cradle
to his tomb with none to recognize him.

'As yet,' cried the stranger--his cheek glowing and his eye flashing
with enthusiasm--'as yet, I have done nothing. Were I to vanish from the
earth tomorrow, none would know so much of me as you: that a nameless
youth came up at nightfall from the valley of the Saco, and opened his
heart to you in the evening, and passed through the Notch by sunrise,
and was seen no more. Not a soul would ask, 'Who was he? Whither did the
wanderer go? But I cannot die till I have achieved my destiny. Then,
let Death come! I shall have built my monument!'

There was a continual flow of natural emotion, gushing forth amid
abstracted reverie, which enabled the family to understand this
young man's sentiments, though so foreign from their own. With quick
sensibility of the ludicrous, he blushed at the ardor into which he had
been betrayed.

'You laugh at me,' said he, taking the eldest daughter's hand, and
laughing himself. 'You think my ambition as nonsensical as if I were to
freeze myself to death on the top of Mount Washington, only that people
might spy at me from the country round about. And, truly, th