narrow limits of the house and farm; their imaginations took
the wings of the poet and rose above all their humble tasks.

I recall how, when the candles were lighted, storyteller, statesman,
explorer, poet and preacher came from the far ends of the earth and
poured their souls into ours. It was a dim light--that of the
candles--but even to-day it shines through the long alley of these many
years upon my pathway. I see now what I saw not then in the
candle-light, a race marching out of darkness, ignorance and poverty
with our little party in the caravan. Crowding on, they widened the
narrow way of their stern religion.

At first we had only _The Horse Farrier, The Cattle Book, The Story of
the Indian Wars_--a book which had been presented to Aunt Deel by her
grandmother, and which in its shroud of white linen lay buried in her
trunk most of the time for fear harm would come to it, as it did,
indeed, when in a moment of generosity she had loaned it to me. The
Bible and the _St. Lawrence Republican_ were always with us.

Many a night, when a speech of Daniel Webster or Henry Clay or Dewitt
Clinton had pushed me to the edge of unconsciousness, while I resisted
by counting the steel links in the watch chain of Uncle Peabody--my
rosary in every time of trouble--I had been bowled over the brink by
some account of horse colic and its remedy, or of the proper treatment
of hoof disease in sheep. I suffered keenly from the horse colic and
like troubles and from the many hopes and perils of democracy in my
childhood. I found the Bible, however, the most joyless book of all,
Samson being, as I thought, the only man in it who amounted to much. A
shadow lay across its pages which came, I think, from the awful
solemnity of my aunt when she opened them. It reminded me of a dark
rainy day made fearful by thunder and lightning. It was not the cheerful
thing, illumined by the immortal faith of man which, since then, I have
found it to be. The box of books changed the whole current of our lives.

I remember vividly that evening when we took out the books and tenderly
felt their covers and read their titles. There were _Cruikshanks' Comic
Almanac_ and _Hood's Comic Annual_; tales by Washington Irving and James
K. Paulding and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Miss Mitford and Miss Austin;
the poems of John Milton and Felicia Hemans. Of the treasures in the box
I have now; in my possession: A life of Washington, _The Life and
Writings of Doctor Duc