“Poor Kate!—­if you should fancy swimming, shooting, or any other unheard-of pursuit, Kate would be obliged to swim and shoot with you.  But I will not laugh any more.  Study, if you will, Alice; you will learn fast enough, and, in this age of fast-advancing civilization, when the chances of eligible matrimony for young ladies in your station are yearly becoming less and less,—­oh, you need not put up your lip and peep into my bachelor’s shaving-glass!—­let me tell you that a literary taste is a recourse not to be despised.  Of course you will study now to astonish me, or to surprise your young friends, or for some other equally wise reason; but the time may come when literature will be its own exceeding great reward.”

“Uncle, answer me one thing,—­are you as happy here in your quiet study as you were in your exciting life among the Indians?  Do you not tire of this everyday sameness?”

“Close questioning, Alice, but I will answer you truly.  Other things being equal, I confess to you that the Indian life was the more monotonous of the two.  I look back now on my twenty years of savage life and see nothing to vary its dreary sameness; the dangers were always alike, the excitements always the same, and the rest was a dead blank.  The whole twenty years might be comprised in four words,—­we fought, we hunted, we eat, we slept.  No, there is no monotony like that,—­no life so stupid as that of the savage, with his low wants and his narrow hopes and fears.  My life here among my books, which seems to you so tame, is excitement itself compared with that.  Your stupidest party is full of life, intelligence, wit, when put beside an Indian powwow.  There is but one charm in that wandering life, Alice,—­the free intercourse with Nature; that never tires; but then you must remember that to enjoy it you must be cultivated up to it.  There needs all the teaching of civilization, nay, the education of life, to enjoy Nature truly.  These quiet hills, these beech forests, are more to me now than Niagara was at eighteen; and Niagara itself, which raises the poet above the earth, falls tame on the mind of the savage.  Believe one who knows,—­the man of civilization who goes back to the savage state throws away his life; his very mind becomes, like the dyer’s hand, ‘subdued to what it works in.’

“But I am going out of your depth again, girls,” continued he, looking at our wondering, half-puzzled faces.  “Let it go, Alice; Life is a problem too hard for you to solve as yet; perhaps it will solve itself.  Meantime, we will brighten ourselves up to-morrow by a good scamper over the hills, and, the next day, if your fancy for study still holds, we will plan out some hard work, and I will show you what real study is.  Now go to bed; but see first that Aunt Molly has her sandwiches and gingerbread ready for the morning.”

TALK NUMBER TWO.

Uncle John was well qualified to show us what real study was, for in his early youth he had read hard and long to fit himself for a literary life.  What had changed his course and driven him to the far West we did not know, but since his return he had brought the perseverance and judgment of middle life to the studies of his youth, and in his last ten years of leisure had made himself that rarest of things among Americans, a scholar, one worthy of the name.