me for a moment, turn to Uncle Eb,
laugh hopelessly and say: 'Thet boy'll hev to be a minister. He can't
work.'

But for Elizabeth Brower it might have gone hard with me those days.
My mind was always on my books or my last talk with Jed Feary, and
she shared my confidence and fed my hopes and shielded me as much as
possible from the heavy work. Hope had a better head for mathematics
than I, and had always helped me with my sums, but I had a better memory
and an aptitude in other things that kept me at the head of most of my
classes. Best of all at school I enjoyed the 'compositions'--I had many
thoughts, such as they were, and some facility of expression, I doubt
not, for a child. Many chronicles of the countryside came off my
pen--sketches of odd events and characters there in Faraway. These were
read to the assembled household. Elizabeth Brower would sit looking
gravely down at me, as I stood by her knees reading, in those days of my
early boyhood. Uncle Eb listened with his head turned curiously, as if
his ear were cocked for coons. Sometimes he and David Brower would slap
their knees and laugh heartily, whereat my foster mother would give them
a quick glance and shake her head. For she was always fearful of the day
when she should see in her children the birth of vanity, and sought to
put it off as far as might be. Sometimes she would cover her mouth to
hide a smile, and, when I had finished, look warningly at the rest, and
say it was good, for a little boy. Her praise never went further, and
indeed all those people hated flattery as they did the devil and frowned
upon conceit She said that when the love of flattery got hold of one he
would lie to gain it.

I can see this slender, blue-eyed woman as I write. She is walking up
and down beside her spinning-wheel. I can hear the dreary buz-z-z-z of
the spindle as she feeds it with the fleecy ropes. That loud crescendo
echoes in the still house of memory. I can hear her singing as she steps
forward and slows the wheel and swings the cradle with her foot:

'On the other side of Jordan,
In the sweet fields of Eden,
Where the tree of Life is blooming,
There is rest for you.

She lays her hand to the spokes again and the roar of the spindle drowns
her voice.

All day, from the breakfast hour to supper time, I have heard the dismal
sound of the spinning as she walked the floor, content to sing of rest
but never taking it.

Her home was almost a miracle of